"Marianne Herrmann's first book is as assured as if it were her tenth. Her stories here often read like novellas, not because of length . . . but because they have the psychological ambition of novels. Their reach does not exceed their grasp. The stories refuse easy epiphanies; neither do they hand you a fashionable plate of anomie.  They are stories, though, and not novellas, because despite the richness of the characters and the subtlety with which the human context is drawn, the heart of their appeal is in the sensual moment."

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