Society & Culture
It’s always challenging to write about a group of short stories: What to mention? In Lynne Sharon Schwartz’s new collection called Truthtelling, “Pickup” deserves notice because, like the last story in the book, about a page turner of musical scores, it references music, a special love, the author says, that has always informed her writing style. “Pickup,” a good-humored romp, begins with a young woman slumping in front of a hotel, smoking, waiting to visit her father just out of surgery. She spies a big fancy car idling nearby and assumes she’s being taken for a hooker, but what the heck, she climbs in. It turns out, though, that she’s been mistaken for a well known pianist and is being driven to perform a Rachmaninoff piano concerto at Town Hall. Well, she did have piano lessons! She goes along, And out on stage. The story’s a hoot, and representative of how Schwartz’s oddball narratives move. For decades Schwartz has been writing award-winning stories, poems, essays, memoirs,