Caltech author’s take on desperate housewives

What does a Caltech lecturer know about desperate housewives, family feuds, and the facades of middle-class suburbia?

Merrill Joan Gerber, a lecturer in creative writing, comments on these issues in her new book, This is a Voice from Your Past: New and Selected Stories. Gerber’s collection of short stories deals with what’s hiding beneath the surface of normal middle-class life, revealed through family fights and triumphs, vulnerable women, and paranoid housewives.

The New York Times Book Review has said, “Gerber’s supple prose takes us right inside her characters’ minds, sometimes funny, sometimes frightening, always absorbing and believeable.” Published in January by Ontario Review Press, the book is now available in stores.

A Caltech lecturer since 1989, Gerber has authored 25 books, including Anna in the Afterlife, one of the Los Angeles Times’s “Best Books of 2002”; the travel memoir Botticelli Blue Skies: An American in Florence; King of the World, winner of the Pushcart Press Editor’s Book Award; and The Kingdom of Brooklyn, which received Hadassah Magazine’s Ribalow Prize. Her short stories have appeared in the New Yorker, the Atlantic Monthly, Mademoiselle, and Redbook, winning her numerous awards, including the O. Henry Award in 1986.

The author will read from and discuss This is a Voice from Your Past on Friday, February 4, at the Huntington Library Overseers’ Room, 1151 Oxford Road, San Marino, at 2:30 p.m. On Wednesday, February 23, at 7 p.m., she will appear at Vroman’s Bookstore, 695 East Colorado Boulevard, Pasadena.
Gerber lives in Sierra Madre with her husband, a retired Pasadena City College professor. She can be reached at mjgerber@caltech.edu or www.its.caltech.edu/~mjgerber.

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