In these superb stories, wry, sardonic, often brutaly funny, the author speaks with disconcerting honesty about people in and out of love, husbands and wives, parents and children, passing strangers. New York is the setting, but like Checkov's Russia, it's a place we all know. Her characters inhabit a world of too little money, too many kids, of husbands gone off somewhere, probably for good. Survivors all, illusions gone, they face the vicissitudes of life with a mixture of cheerful optimism and rueful acceptance.