is a collection of thirteen moving stories about relationships - men and women caught in emotions they struggle to understand and control. Literary fiction from award-winning author . A woman confronts her terror at the fragility of her marriage as she and her husband engineer a pickup attempt in a restaurant for their woefully-obsessed friend. "'Twin beds' 'Double, ' their voices collide." Marooned at a decrepit hotel in a snowstorm, two friends confront their feeling for each other, while her fiancé lurks. A woman goes to the Greenwich Village Halloween parade dressed as a hemorrhoid sufferer, meets a snarky Cinderella and a rabbit, and considers the rabbit's odd proposition to spend the night with him. They met in college just moments after she tried to kill herself. As their paths crossed over the years they grew more and more desperately in love. Now it is her wedding day. She is marrying someone else, and he is there. "Sad and touching," the late novelist Evan S. Connell wrote of the story's "angry, baffled, fading actor singing from his apartment balcony to an unlistening world." Connell chose the story for a Kansas Arts Commission/Kansas Quarterly Fiction Award. These and the eight other poignant and gripping stories in this dazzling collection run the gamut from funny to tearful, often in the same story. The tension and suspense from scene to scene, story to story will rivet the reader. Some stories narrated by women and some by men, they plumb the depths of relationships: romance and heartbreak, sex and passion, exhilaration and pain, love and entanglement. The characters will linger in the reader's mind long after the final tale has been read.