Sex and Sensibility: 28 True Romances from the Lives of Single Women »

Genevieve Field is a senior editor at Glamour. She is the cofounder of the Web magazine Nerve (nerve.com), the editor of Nerve: The New Nude, and the coeditor of Nerve: Literate Smut and Full Frontal Fiction.

It's all about you. Your apartment. Your job. Your dates. Your sex life. Your time off. Your exercise. Your food. Your music. Your future. What are you waiting for? Who will you love? What is it, really, that you want?

The life of a single woman in the twenty-first century is full of new connections, new sex, new love, and new loss. It's about letting the laundry pile up, sipping strong drinks with near strangers, and dishing to girlfriends on those foggy-headed, flushed morning-afters. But it isn't all heightened connections and steamy dates. The single girl is no stranger to the scramble for a Saturday night plan, the oh-so-promising guy who took her number at a party and then -- poof! -- disappeared, the ever narrowing circle of unattached girlfriends....

In Sex and Sensibility twenty-nine of today's most acclaimed -- and often bestselling -- female authors write about the push-pull between independence and vulnerability, fearlessness and self-doubt that defines single life. Jennifer Weiner, Pam Houston, Laurie Notaro, Amy Sohn, and Julianna Baggott are just a few of the real-life heroines whose stories about long-distance dating, twenty-something divorce, online crushes, and thrilling one-night stands make up this funny, frank, and unabashedly erotic celebration of singlehood and sisterhood -- a quintessential handbook for today's independent woman.

Publishers Weekly

A collection of short essays sets out to reveal the truth about sex and the modern single girl via tales of love lost, sought and found. And while the importance of this exploration is open to debate in a world saturated with Cosmo confessions and Sex and the City reruns, and the stories assembled here do little to assert their necessity, they're generally quite enjoyable. Elissa Schappell's "Confessions of a Teenage Cocktease" is a sparkling, incisive account of finding true love almost by mistake, and Erika Krouse's "Penelope" is a funny-sad look at a humiliating breakup. With only a few exceptions, the essays focus on heterosexual sex, and almost every scene is clearly situated in an urban environment (often New York). Only one story touches on the matter of sexual assault, nor is there much that's titillating. The similarity of the authors' voices and experiences combined with the pieces' brevity and earnest feminism-lite tone prevent the content from being truly provocative or groundbreaking. Readers will find moments of truth, comedy and poignant recognition in this compendium, but they won't find much that's challenging. Agent, Jenny Bent. (Feb.) Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.