Rough Translations/ Molly Giles/ 1985 / pp135

I picked this up b/c the author won a Flannery O'Connor award and I was hoping for some good ole southern gothicness (fingers crossed, maybe this one will have a deformed cousin with a terrible secret living in the milk shed) or at least stories with wry, awful, twists of truth. I was disappointed on the first count but Giles really hit it out of the park with "observations/truth about what it is like to be a woman in her late 20s." Her voice is clear and her characters are consistently aching for completeness, and looking for it wherever they've found it before-- in the arms of their lover, their children, or the bottom of a glass. Old Soul, The Planter Box, and Peril are my favorites but all are worth a read.