Title: The island of the mapmaker's wife & other tales
First published: 1996
Description: The Island of the Mapmaker's Wife is a stunning debut of an original and memorable voice in fiction. In five beautifully crafted love stories, Marilyn Sides brings to life richly detailed worlds. An obsession to possess an object or perfect a process converges with erotic passion for Sides's men and women. In the title story, Descostes, an expert map dealer and collector, travels to Amsterdam in pursuit of a gorgeous 17th-century Dutch map that possesses a carnal secret only she can see.

For Bingham, of "Temporary Tattoos," acquiring a tattoo of Leth's name is a perfect expression of their short-lived affair - as the temporary tattoo fades, so will her love, she hopes. In "Kites!", a travel writer and his stay-at-home wife become kit crazy as they try to recover from their failure to conceive a child. With their marriage unraveling, they rediscover each other during a passionate and dangerous kite-flying session on Boston's North Shore.

"Bead Trade" revolves around a lonely bead trader and a woman sculptor who is carving a group of huge granite beads as a monument to a New England suffragist. The bead trader finds in her an intense artistic absorption that provides both rest from his constant bead-collecting trips and a newfound sense of vital energy.

A novel cum travelogue, "The Master of the Pink Glyphs" closes the collection. While touring Maya ruins, Morley, desperately trying to make sense of her lover's desertion, is invited to join an archaeological excavation team, documenting and sketching their finds. She becomes obsessed with the art of an ancient Mayan painter whose work employs a Catholic display of ritual and sacrifice, which help her transmute her grief into understanding.
Subjects: Collectors and collecting, Fiction
LC classification: PS3569.I4449 I82 1996