"Ms. Beattie's people-the battered emotional casualties of the 1960s and the hip survivors of the Me generation-are teetering now on the margins of middle age, and the aging process has made them somewhat less careless about their lives... The stories in this volume attest to Ms. Beattie's gift for weird analogies, her ability to grab cheap, glittering bits of dialogue out of the air. What's new about these stories is their intermittent lyricism, combined with a shift of voice that signals a willingness on the part of the author to risk subjectivity....The result is stories that have the capacity to move as well as persuade us." -- Michiko Kakutani -- biblio.com