Someone Should Know This Story
Selected Stories
By Merrill Joan Gerber
“‘Someone Should Know This Story’ is both the name of this book and the wish of my heart,” writes Merrill Joan Gerber in the introduction to this retrospective collection of twenty-six stories written over a period of four decades, many of which won awards and appeared in widely read periodicals such as The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Redbook, and Mademoiselle.
Gerber takes her teacher Andrew Lytle’s advice to “follow the thread back into the labyrinth” of the heart and its secrets. Finding its starting place with the crises of everyday family life—its conflicts, betrayals, confinements, and its devastating losses—she and her characters constantly reencounter themselves and the persistent yearning to “convey to others what we are” with grace and breathtaking honesty.
Merrill Joan Gerber has written thirty books, including The Kingdom of Brooklyn, winner of the Ribalow Award from Hadassah Magazine, and King of the World, winner of the Pushcart Editors’ Book Award. Her fiction has been published in the New Yorker, the Sewanee Review, the Atlantic, Mademoiselle, and Redbook, and her essays in the American Scholar, Salmagundi, and Commentary. She has won an O. Henry Award, a Best American Essays award, and a Wallace Stegner fiction fellowship to Stanford University. She retired in 2020 after teaching writing at the California Institute of Technology for thirty-two years. Her literary archive is now at the Yale Beinecke Rare Book Library.