These 28 stories explore the diverse terrain of women's experiences as mothers, daughters, wives, lovers, artists, and friends. Ellen Gilchrist's "Light Can Be Both Wave and Particle" chronicles the touching romance between a young schoolteacher from Arkansas and an earnest Chinese medical student; Alice McDermott's "Enough" introduces us to a woman with an insatiable desire for ice cream. Here, too, are stories by such classic practitioners of the form as Sandra Cisneros, Grace Paley, Alice Munro, and Joyce Carol Oates, and by writers more recently arrived on the literary scene, including Jhumpa Lahiri, ZZ Packer, and Marisa Silver. In her introduction, Wendy Martin describes this anthology as "wrestling with the cultural and social prohibitions that have been with us for centuries." Taken together, these stories provide a collective mirror of the remarkable transformations that have occurred in the lives of women in the final decades of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st.