Interesting Women: Stories

The cover of my (European) edition of Lee's short stories is misleading. Between the gritty Vogue-ish photo of an elegantly dressed woman's back, the gold script font of the title, and the dominant blurb by Elle Magazine on the back, you'd think you were in for some classy chick lit. What you get instead are a series of expertly crafted, sophisticated literary gems. With precision, control, and deadpan wit, Lee sketches a series of female characters who find themselves at cultural crossroads: ex-patriots living in a new language, cosmopolitan professionals dating across racial lines, first-world citizens figuring out the terms of their status in the greater world, individuals making sense of their various, conflicting cultural legacies. There's not a single weak story in this collection. I particularly enjoyed "Brothers and Sisters Around the World" and "Anthropology."

I read a wonderful review of this book in the New York Times, bought it and had it on my shelf when a good friend told me I HAD to read it. Once I started, I couldn't put it down! The stories are about everything I find relevant and interesting: relationships between men and women, and between women and women, the dynamics of race, and travel and life in other countries. Isn't this what life is about? Well it is for educated, mixed-race women who enjoy and appreciate travel and living overseas, and who are or were married.I am looking forward to Andrea Lee's next book with eager anticipation!

the book is great, just a little repetitive is all. Lee is an incredibly gifted, astute, dryly humorous writer who deals with complex topics like race, gender, sex and class with great subtley and style. The only problem is that all of her short stories employ nearly the exact same tone and narrative voice -- the same quietly observant female who makes sly little observations about all of the above-mentioned themes. After a while you start to long for a man's perspective or a variation in tone or style, just to mix things up a little. Nadine Gordimer does this with great skill -- hopefully Andrea Lee will evolve to become as dexterous as Gordimer is at portraying many different points of view. In any case, Lee is off to brilliant start!

I first discovered Lee when I read her brilliantly sly, sexy & astute short story "Brothers and Sisters Around the World" in the anthology of 2001 Best American Short Stories. So when I came across her own collection of short stories, intriguingly called Interesting Women, I immediately bought it. I was a little disappointed to see that the tone in almost all of her stories was surprisingly repetitive. Almost every single story is told from the nearly identical point of view of an intelligent, observant and slightly judgemental woman. This quote from her story "Full Moon Over Milan" perfectly describes the character of that ever-present female narrator: "With family and lovers Merope learned early to defend her own behavior by adopting the role of ironic spectator, an over-perceptive little girl observing unsurprised the foibles of her elders." Still, despite the fact that the narrator, the tone, and the themes (of sex, race, nationality and gender) are repeated over and over again, the stories are nevertheless incredibly compelling, thought-provoking and, ultimately, quite satisfying. With time, I hope to see Lee grow to be as skilled a writer as Nadine Gordimer, who explores many of the same themes in a slightly more varied way in her own quite brilliant stories. In the meantime, I strongly recommend that people read Lee's Interesting Women to discover an equally brilliant writer in the making.

This book is great! The writing is suburb--dense but not too "much" for before bed or vacation reading. Her female characters are so well drawn. They are smart, self aware but never self-indulgent and annoying and the tone is great and the themes--about women relating to women, to men, about class distinctions among blacks, etc--are fantastic. it departs from the Bridget Jones genre, taking more risks, is slightly more literary than the multitude of "female perspective" books out there right now, and more complicated. A total pleasure to read, i'm recommending it to everyone i talk to.