Throw Like a Girl »

Jean Thompson is the author of Who Do You Love: Stories, a 1999 National Book Award finalist for fiction, and the novels City Boy and Wide Blue Yonder, a New York Times Notable Book and Chicago Tribune Best Fiction selection. She lives in Urbana, Illinois. Visit her at www.jeanthompsononline.com.

A master of short fiction whose "best pieces are as good as it gets in contemporary cction" (Newsday) returns, as Jean Thompson follows her National Book Award finalist collection Who Do You Love with Throw Like a Girl.

Here are twelve new stories that take dead aim at the secrets of womanhood, arcing from youth to experience. Each one of Thompson's indelible characters -- lovers, wives, friends, and mothers -- speaks her piece -- wry, angry, hopeful -- about the world and women's places in it.

The New York Times - Jennifer Egan

Welcome to the feminine cosmos of Throw Like a Girl, whose population includes some of the most domineering dames to appear in recent fiction. We re talking women who say things like (a mother describing her daughter s boyfriend in Holy Week ): He was narrow-chested and his hips were so skinny that they seemed only a kind of attachment mechanism for his penis. Or (in A Woman Taken in Adultery ): We were at a dinner party. Me with my husband, who I had trained to sit up and beg food from the table. Girl children are equally corrosive; the first story, The Brat, begins, She hated her mother and she hated her father too, at least when he was around to be hated.

The Brat     1
The Five Senses     21
It Would Not Make Me Tremble to See Ten Thousand Fall     46
The Family Barcus     71
Lost     97
The Inside Passage     116
Holy Week     135
A Normal Life     161
Hunger     194
The Woman Taken in Adultery     219
Pie of the Month     243
Throw Like a Girl     266