Shoes, Hair, Nails: Short Stories

These eleven stories slip past the quotidian into complex emotional landscapes. Negotiating relationships between mothers and daughters, husbands and wives, lovers and friends, the fiction forges a chain of crafted memories with images that function as symbols: a beauty salon stands in for home, a mother works as Minnie Mouse to please her child, red Chinese slippers embody a secret. With keen metaphoric intuition, the writer sets forth details that reflect character and symbols her characters can react to. She writes with a poet's attention to sound, as in Crazy Charlotte,where an ostracized mother shows a child another way to see: "My eyelids fluttered. I wanted to open them but was afraid. Would I find myself in a trance? What would I do? Finally I blinked, opened my eyes, looked around the room. Above me, rotating around the bed, was a mobile resembling the solar system. Beyond that, on the midnight blue ceiling, was a galaxy of glitter." These stories, written with wry humor and tenderness, fresh language and captivating characters,illuminate the many ways we inhabit this world. I heartily recommend Shoes Hair Nails.