These twenty-four stories, seven new and the rest selected from Johnson’s previous four collections, range from ‘The Metamorphosis,’ in which a young female impersonator is torn to pieces by her fans, to ‘Last Encounter with the Enemy,’ a battle of wills between Flannery O’Connor and a precocious eleven-year-old boy. Other women writers from the past encountered here are Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Plath, and Emily Dickinson. Stories from the new collection have been included in The O. Henry Prize Stories, New Stories from the South: The Year’s Best, and the PEN Syndicated Fiction Project.