Daniel Pearlman

Very sad for me to hear the news of Dan Pearlman’s death: http://www.sfsite.com/news/2013/02/20/obituary-daniel-pearlman/

I got to know him as well as you can know anyone without actually meeting them, i.e.  through emails and membership of the Storyville discussion forum, and with ‘Nemonymous’ proudly publishing two of his stories, one (With Arms Outstretched) in the very first issue in 2001 and the other (A Giant in the House) in the very last issue  in 2010.

To my mind these stories were classics of their kind, uniquely Pearlmanesque, and his work should have been more widely known.  Hopefully it will be, as it deserves. I’d be surprised if it doesn’t become an important feature of literature.  There is something special about Pearlman fiction, as I discovered when I had the chance to read it.

This is what I wrote here in 2010 about ‘A Giant in the House’ after first appearing in Nemonymous #10:

“A Giant in the House by Daniel Pearlman
[…] I’m sorry, I can’t hold back, this story is a genuine personal rite of passage. So utterly poignant, so obliquely clever in its portrayal of a father and his working-class family – and I literally wept tears when I first read this story, as it ‘progressed’ from Superman via a potato to a mite from Thomas Mann’s ‘The Holy Sinner’. There is no way I can review this story without re-reading it and finding more and more in it – again and again. The trials and tribulations of life with semi-Ligottian resonances. […]“

Rest in peace. ‘With Arms Outstretched’.