Edith Pearlman, whose acclaimed 2011 collection of short stories, Binocular Vision, lifted her out of relative publishing obscurity to make her an instant if belated literary star at the age of 74, died on Jan. 1 at her home in Brookline, MA. She was 86.

“Why in the world had I never heard of Edith Pearlman?” the novelist Roxana Robinson asked in a rave review of the collection on the front page of The New York Times Book Review. “Each story was chosen to show Ms. Pearlman’s range as she brought the reader into the private worlds of characters as disparate as suburban mothers and Holocaust survivors. The characters tend to have dark secrets, and their lives are transformed from the ordinary to the unexpected in a moment,” The New York Times said.

Ms. Pearlman was nominated in 2011 for a National Book Award, and prizes followed, including the National Book Critics Circle Award and the PEN Malamud Award for excellence in the short story.