In Pins and Needles, Karen Brown explores love and loss between mother and child, husband and wife, close friends, and virtual strangers. In many of these stories, Brown shows how love emerges as infidelity--incongruous and disruptive, threatening the stability of daily life. In "She Fell to Her Knees," Nell inherits the neglected house in which her mother died years before, and begins an affair with the neighbor. The narrator...