Her short story collection Imagine a Great White Light won a Pushcart Press Editor's Award and was named one of the best books of 1991 by USA Today, and her short story "Afterbirth" won a 1999 O. Henry Award.
She was awarded a two-year Wallace Stegner Fellowship at Stanford University, from 1981 to 1983, for writing fiction.
[1] Imagine a Great White Light was published in 1991 by Pushcart Press, as the winner of its annual Editor's Award for "overlooked manuscripts of enduring literary value."
Kirkus Reviews described it as "nine stories, mostly about families: a good dose of Ann Beattie minimalism with a Jewish slant and with some witty Lorrie Moore urban angst thrown in for good measure," evaluating it as "a graceful debut with a quirky voice and a couple of offbeat perspectives."
The Publishers Weekly review concluded: "by turns dreamy and hard-edged, these stories are disturbing and, occasionally, profound."
[3][8][9] It is described in an apparent publisher's summary, repeated by several booksellers, as a "Jewish/Gothic" novel, reminiscent of Cynthia Ozick, that tells the story of Jane Rozen, who "leaves her three daughters and husband Saul, a rabbi, to care for her mother in Florida.
"[8][10] A review in Publishers Weekly called it a "strong debut novel," in which "Schwartz takes a hard look at the dark secrets hiding within a marriage.
"[11] A Plain Dealer review concluded that it "makes wise observations about families and the gaps between what outsiders see and what the players themselves experience.
He described its objective as "to reclaim the 'cancer story' from the realm of Lifetime Channel TV—that bland, easy sentiment" and its crucial idea as, "while our minds are still running, things are never really over.
Her fiction walks this incredible thin line between hilarity and despair, between the absurd and the tragic, between detachment and compassion.
She maneuvers with a dizzying, frightening grace—the way that Philippe Petit walked the high wire between the twin towers of the World Trade Center.