A Blind Man Can See How Much I Love You: Stories

By Amy Bloom

Amy Bloom was nominated for a National Book Award for her first collection, Come to Me, and her fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, Story, Antaeus, and other magazines, and in The Best American Short Stories and Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards. In her new collection, she enhances her reputation as a true artist of the form.

Here are characters confronted with tragedy, perplexed by emotions, and challenged to endure whatever modern life may have in store. A loving mother accompanies her daughter in her journey to become a man, and discovers a new, hopeful love. A stepmother and stepson meet again after fifteen years and a devastating mistake, and rediscover their familial affection for each other. And in "The Story," a widow bent on seducing another woman's husband constructs and deconstructs her story until she has "made the best and happiest ending" possible "in this world."

• Language: English
• Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
• Release date: Jul 8, 2009
• ISBN: 9780307417855

Amy Bloom

Amy Bloom is the author of a novel, Love Invents Us, and two collections of stories: Come to Me, nominated for a National Book Award, and A Blind Man Can See How Much I Love You, nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Her stories have appeared in Best American Short Stories, Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards, and numerous anthologies here and abroad. She has written for the New Yorker, the New York Times Magazine, the Atlantic Monthly , Vogue, Slate, and Salon, among many other publications, and has won a National Magazine Award. Her first book of nonfiction, Normal: Transsexual CEOs, Crossdressing Cops, and Hermaphrodites with Attitude, is an exploration of the varieties of gender. She lives in Connecticut and teaches at Yale University.

Reviews for A Blind Man Can See How Much I Love You

[viviennestrauss · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I don't even know what I can say about this book to do it justice. Each story was so moving, some left me breathless, others like sharp talons were tearing at my heart.

[petroglyph_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

A blind man can see how much I love you is a set of careful observations of the emotional lives of ordinary people pushed beyond their comfort zone. Among others, there’s a parent coming to terms with her daughter’s sex change; a woman unexpectedly dishing out petty class-based revenge; a lesbian cancer patient finding herself attracted to a male friend, and a woman working through a miscarriage. These characters are carefully drawn with words and sentences that are precisely sparse enough. Bloom’s language is a tightly focused one, favouring minimalism over quantity as she throws her characters off the deep end. In A blind man… Bloom has penned a series of resolutely crafted stories that successfully pack a film’s worth of emotional developments into a few pages.

[lilysea · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Love the title story. The others are just so-so.

[patience_crabstick · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

Meh. I couldn't get into it. Maybe it was the frequent referrals to nurses as bitches. This is just not the type of writing that appeals to me.

[amyfaerie · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Not her best, but still a fine book.