Interesting Women

From the acclaimed author of Red Island House, Andrea Lee's brilliant, outrageous collection of short stories confronts identity, desire, colliding cultures, and self-discovery.In vivid prose infused with wicked irony, award-winning author Andrea Lee takes us into the hearts and minds of a number of extraordinary women—intelligent, beautiful, self-possessed—who, with wit and style, grapple with questions of identity in an increasingly connected world where everyone has become, in some way, a foreigner. In "The Birthday Present," a loyal and conventional American wife explores the wilder shores of marital devotion by giving her Italian husband a costly present. "Winter Barley" is the account, alternately lyrical and perverse, of the brief love affair in Scotland between an elderly European prince and a thoroughly modern New England beauty half his age. And in the collection's title story, "Interesting Women," a woman on vacation in Thailand...