May you live in interesting times
By: Tereze Glück.
Series: The Iowa short fiction award
Publisher: University of Iowa Press
Published: 1995
Place of publication: Iowa City
Language: eng
Number of pages: 163
Description: Obsession, adultery, infidelity, unrequited love, suicide, betrayal, death - Tereze Gluck's clear-sighted characters coolly assess their actions and reactions. When a man's wife dies suddenly, he feels liberated, and learning this stuns him. Taking a leap into personhood, a child watching her mother in the garden experiences empathy. A woman addicted to a lover realizes how she has squandered herself. A kiss in a taxicab sets two people on the road to inevitability.

Scars, even small ones, reflect the power and mystery of the roads people take from one life into another. In the intense title story, suicide, long-distance love, and a cat's nine lives overshadow a woman's subterranean life.