From the author of the acclaimed story collection The Other Language comes a fresh collection of six colorful, richly realized stories told with inimitable humor, exactitude, and heart.

Centering us in Rome, but transporting us seamlessly into worlds as varied and exotic as they are emotionally real, these stories paint landscapes that are populated--vividly, hauntingly--by animals: from squawking, violent seagulls, to magical snakes, to a tiny dog on the side of a deserted road, to starlings circling the evening sky in exhilarating formation. In the foreground, in unforgettable, cinematic frames, events unfold, especially in the lives of women: an affair ends painfully at a dinner table; an actress''s past comes crashing down on her during an audition; an unhappy wife seeks but can''t quite find respite in a historic palazzo sublet; two couples imagine parenthood in the home of a woman named for the Greek goddess Hera; a young girl returns from drug rehab and sets out anew, with a traveling circus; a man in crisis draws his ex-girlfriend deep into the New Mexico desert. Each story tells of deeply human moments of realization and recognition, instants of irrevocable change, and, for the fortunate, of unexpected clarity.