Short fiction filled with both warmth and dark wit by a writer who "embraces the ironies and the absurdities of the ordinary world" (Newsday). At the age of twenty-five, Marian Thurm began publishing short stories in the New Yorker, and over a remarkable career, her work has been compared to the short fiction of Lorrie Moore, Ann Beattie, and Amy Bloom. Known for her uncanny sense of the absurd along with her empathy for her characters, Thurm's acclaimed writing has been featured in The Best American Short Stories, as well as numerous other anthologies. This volume, selected from her four collections-with stories written over a span of forty-two years-shows Thurm's remarkable craft, never failing to reveal both her emotional acuity and her pitch-dark humor. "Marian Thurm is either a movingly compassionate observer of human foibles or a charmingly ruthless one." -The New York Times Book Review