In its seven year's of life (up till the publication of this collection) Spare Rib had helped to foster a fresh wave of imaginative writing, born of women's growing awareness of their power to create and of the validity of their own voices. Hard Feelings reflects the strength and scope of that work. These stories and poems are unromantic, confident, candid, conscious of struggle. They portray women's reality as women themselves see it, not as popular images say it should be. A variety of themes and approaches from lucid realism to black humour mirror the passionate complexities of women's lives and perceptions. Hard Feelings is about hard truths and gut feelings - about girlhood and widowhood, militancy and mothering, war and sex-war. Here are twenty-nine writers, from all over the world, unafraid to put blisters on the page.