In ten powerful stories Salter portrays men and women in their most intimate moments. A book dealer faces the truth about his life-as it is and never will be again-when he is visited unexpectedly by his brash former girlfriend. A lonely married woman after a disturbing encounter with a drunken poet at a dinner party finds herself irresistibly drawn to his animal surrogate a huge tawny-eyed dog. A lover of poetry must come to terms with his wifes request to give up what may be his most treasured relationship. And in the title story already hailed as a masterpiece clearly and without question a translator tormented by an agonizing sense of inevitability assists in his wifes suicide even as he performs a last betrayal. A haunting symphony of desire memory and loss from a writer whose assured style and emotional insight make him one of our most compelling and important literary voices at work today. Salter is a writer who particularly rewards those for whom reading is an intense pleasure. He is among the very few North American writers all of whose work I want to read whose as yet unpublished books I wait for impatiently Susan Sontag