Gina Berriault has been publishing short stories and novels for more than 30 years. For most of this time, she's suffered the mixed blessing of being a "writer's writer"--somebody with a fanatic following within the literary community and near invisibility outside of it. With Women in Their Beds, however, Berriault seems finally to be receiving the recognition she's always deserved. The book--a greatest hits collection that includes nine new stories--has already won the National Book Critics Circle Award, the PEN/Faulkner Award, and the Rea Foundation Prize. Lyrical, concise, and stubbornly resistant to secondhand wisdom, these stories are (in the words of Richard Ford) "nonpareil [and] just simply wonderful."