Portrait of My Mother, Who Posed Nude in Wartime: Stories — Marjorie Sandor

"These beautiful stories freeze the sweep of the hands of the clock, they stop the beat of your heart, with the precision of their language and their generous emotion." -- Frederick Busch

Linked stories follow a Jewish-American family across several generations. Clara comes from a restrained, secretive family lending the book a taut narrative tension. The big secret -- her husband's adultery during World War II -- is not revealed until the last story. Sandor's prose is quiet, moving, psychologically acute.

Marjorie Sandor is the author of The Night Gardener (Lyons) and A Night of Music (Ecco). Her fiction has been anthologized in Best American Short Stories, The Pushcart Prize XIII, and The Best of Beacon. She teaches at Oregon State University in Corvallis.