Amy Hempel

A complete collection of short works offers insight into the progression of the writer's work throughout a thirty-year period and features, among other tales, the complete texts of "At the Gates of the Animal Kingdom" and "Tumble Home."

"The Dog of the Marriage, Amy Hempel's fourth collection, is about sexual obsession, relationships gone awry, and the unsatisfied longings of everyday life." "In "Offertory," a modern-day Scheherazade entertains and manipulates her lover with stories of her sexual encounters with a married couple as a very young woman. In "Reference #388475848-5," a letter contesting a parking ticket becomes a beautiful and unnerving statement of faith. In "Jesus Is Waiting," a woman driving to New York sends a series of cryptically honest postcards to an old lover. And the title story is a heartbreaking tale about the objects and animals and unmired desires that are left behind after death or divorce."--Jacket.

Tumble Home is narrated by people with skewed visions of home. Not exactly crazy, they become obsessed and irrational as their inner logic leads them astray. In the title novella, a woman living in a psychiatric halfway house writes to a man she has met only once. Proceeding in brief vignettes that link and illuminate, she recounts her peculiar life with the other patients. The accretions of anecdote lead deeper and deeper into the psyche and history of the narrator, gradually revealing the reason for her urgent letter.