The twenty-three stories in this debut collection provide short, sharp shocks - jolts of recognition, surprise or delight. In her tales of ordinary people in extraordinary situations, Judy Budnitz plays with the boundaries of time and reality, from the young man persuaded to donate his heart to his dying mother, to the girl in post-apocalyptic suburbia whose only friend is a man in a dog suit, to a short history of women contained within the pages of a fall fashion catalogue. Laced with wit and imagination, these stories announce the arrival of a uniquely talented new voice in fiction, a young writer leaping boldly into the next generation of American writers.
