From the author of the acclaimed Ruined by Reading, a new book about making connections in our increasingly disconnected and technologically mediated world

Following Ruined by Reading, Face to Face takes the author from her solitary life in books to her shared life with others —from the most marginal encounters on the street to the close relationships that sustain her.

eginning with the title piece—a witty and insightful look at how the telephone has changed the way we relate to each other—Schwartz leads readers through a landscape of our attempts at connection. The author encounters a brilliant student silenced by his experiences in Vietnam and a page turner whose grace eclipses the performance of the pianist she assists. Schwartz makes peace with a cat, loses interest in a date, catches a stranger's eye, and is startled by her own image seen through a loving photographer's lens.

As always, we recognize ourselves in her sometimes wary, sometimes hopeful, and always fiercely intelligent gaze. Face to Face is essential reading for all who value human relationships in our rapidly changing world.

"Schwartz is at home with the personal essay, a form that, ideally, bonds writer and reader into a kind of intimate literary friendship. . . in each [piece] she shares her humanity with her readers. These essays are candid, refreshingly modest, self-analytical but free of what Lopate calls 'the stench of ego.'" — Diane White, Boston Globe, May 2, 2000

"In Face to Face, her second collection of personal essays, the novelist Lynne Sharon Schwartz resembles one of her fictional characters: a sensitive, family-oriented semibohemian whose tastes are literary but refreshingly unstuffy and whose sense of humor tends toward the sly and offbeat. . . . Schwartz's strongest essays demonstrate her gift as a storyteller." —New York Times Book Review