Loss of Memory Is Only Temporary: Stories

Written by Johanna Kaplan

Narrated by Nicole Poole

A funny, fresh, and brilliantly insightful collection of stories from a beloved writer, with a new introduction by Francine Prose

Johanna Kaplan’s beautifully written stories first burst on the literary scene in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Today they have retained all of their depth, surprise, and humor—their simultaneously scathing, hilarious, and compassionate insight into character and behavior. From Miriam, home from school with the measles, to Louise, the daughter of a family that fled Vienna for the Dominican Republic, to Naomi, a young psychiatrist, her heroines are fierce, tender, funny, and cuttingly smart.

At once specific to a particular period, place, and milieu—mainly, Jewish New York in the decades after World War II—Kaplan’s stories resonate with universal significance. In this new collection, which includes both early and later stories, unforgettably vivid characters are captured in all of their forceful presence and singularity, their foolishness and their wisdom, their venality and their nobility, while, hovering in the background, the inexorable passage of time and the unending pull of memory render silent judgment.

In its pitch-perfect command of dialogue matched with interwoven subtleties of insight and feeling and a masterful control of language, Loss of Memory Is Only Temporary is itself a timeless collection of the finest work by one of the most extraordinary talents of our age. 

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperAudio
• Release date: Feb 15, 2022
• ISBN: 9780063061651

Johanna Kaplan

Johanna Kaplan is the author of Other People’s Lives, a collection of stories, and O My America!, a novel. Her books were finalists for the National Book Award, the American Book Award, and the Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award, and she has twice received the National Jewish Book Award for fiction, as well as the Edward Lewis Wallant Award and the Kenneth B. Smilen/Present Tense Literary Award. Her stories, essays, and reviews have appeared in Commentary, Harper’s Magazine, Moment, the New York Times Book Review, and City Journal, and her stories have been widely anthologized. Her essay “Tales of My Great-Grandfathers” appears in the Schocken anthology Who We Are: On Being (and Not Being) a Jewish American Writer. A native New Yorker, she lives in Manhattan and for many years worked as a teacher of emotionally disturbed children at Mount Sinai Hospital. She is currently at work on a novel with the tentative title Forbidden.