In "How Will I Know You?," Marianne, on the rebound from what seems to have been the beginning of a delirious love affair, seeks a cure for her insomnia from a man she soon (but not soon enough) comes to label "the psychotic herbalist." In "A Mad Maze Made by God," Barbara Dwyer, at loose ends at the reception following her own wedding, is congratulated by a mystery guest who is maliciously profusive with her as he implies that he's had a sexual relationship with her new husband.

In "Invisible Target," an enigmatic young woman arrives at a nursing school late in the fall term, trailing behind her a checkered sexual history and a need to visit the residence doctor once a week "for a shot of penicillin and a little chat." And in "Two Women: The Interviews," Delphine imagines the parts of the city where her husband is driven to trysts by his mistress as the more pastoral parts ("the green urban bowers where they would whisper and kiss").

Intimate, fresh, intense, unforgettable, these remarkable stories introduce us to women and men who are absolutely individual in their moral complexity, women and men whose voices speak to us (and to one another) with passion and wit, longing and desperation - voices that lead us into a world whose inhabitants are exploring, however haphazardly, the themes of existence.