"These gems of short fiction by women writers from Taiwan are a wonderful treat. Beautifully translated into English, they unfold and flicker with wistful, comic, and enigmatic lights and shadows. The vignettes and snapshots imbue existential anxiety and street life with grim and exquisite lyricism, mixed with unstoppable yearnings for sunlight and romance." —Ban Wang, William Haas Professor in Chinese Studies and Professor of Comparative Literature, Stanford University"What is striking about this fascinating volume of writings by the contemporary set of Taiwan’s established and emerging women writers is the eclectic range of its content. Stories explore marriage and divorce, illness and death, feminism and misogyny, sexual ambitions and desires—a thirty-year-old woman engages in casual sex in a desperate effort to get pregnant, while a fifteen-year-old fantasizes about having sex with a much older man. Together, these stories show us how Taiwan’s society is uniquely traditional and hy
