From Publishers Weekly
Portraits of mothers as nurturing and needy, supportive and critical, sources of humor and wisdom, who, according to Oates's foreword, inspire in their daughters "continual, frustrating speculation," give this collection "an extraordinary range and depth of what the term mother can mean," says South African writer Berliner in her introduction. The editors have gathered 17 stories or excerpts by leading women writers, and by some who are less well known. Some pieces are familiar, like Isabel Allende's lush, evocative "Wicked Girl," where 11-year-old Elena Mejias's sexual awakening is aroused by her mother's attractive boarder. While many selections have been culled from other works, it's satisfying to read a little-known gem from a well-known writer, like Margaret Atwood, whose "Significant Moments in the Life of My Mother" comes from her 1983 novel Bluebeard's Egg. Oates extracts from a recent novel typically spare, disturbing prose describing a suicidal mother picking up her daughter at school. Ursula Le Guin's vision of motherhood in the future, "Solitude," is juxtaposed thematically with Lorrie Moore's reverse chronology in "How to Talk to Your Mother." Jamaica Kincaid, Edna O'Brien, Julia Alvarez, Gloria Naylor and Alice Walker also contribute their unique visions. Equally satisfying selections represent less prominent writers like Jane Shapiro, Katherine Dunn, Martha Soukup, Bette Greene and editor Berliner. Madness, murder, love and guilt are among the topics explored in stories that reveal not just the complex relationships between women and between generations, but also the intelligence and ingenuity of some of today's best writers of short fiction. (Sept.) Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist
Where short fiction circulates, this meaty collection of stories by women about mothers and motherhood should find readers. Oates and Berliner supply, respectively, a brief foreword and an introduction that sketches their editorial process and links between the stories they've gathered. The contributors include both familiar names and more obscure ones: Isabel Allende, Julia Alvarez, Margaret Atwood, Katherine Dunn, Mary Gordon, Lois Gould, Bette Greene, Jamaica Kincaid, Ursula K. LeGuin, Lorrie Moore, Gloria Naylor, Edna O'Brien, Jane Shapiro, Martha Soukup, Alice Walker, and the editors. The tales collected here cover the range of emotion and ambivalence women experience about their mothers; they consider coming of age and the coming of death, dream worlds and gritty reality, presence and absence, isolating distance and overwhelming intimacy. Kincaid's "Girl" takes up not quite two pages, while Gould's "La Lloradora" (excerpted from La Presidenta) and LeGuin's "Solitude" run more than two dozen, yet each (and all the others) supply that intensity of vision readers seek from quality short fiction. Mary Carroll
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

FROM THE PUBLISHER

All seventeen stories deal with a single, central, and vital theme, the relationship of mothers to daughters and daughters to mothers, and it is the interplay of this dynamic that provides the focus of these stories.

SYNOPSIS

Literary short stories about mother-daughter relationships from some of the century's best writers, Isabel Allende, Jamaica Kincaid, Gloria Naylor, Alice Walker, Joyce Carol Oates, Ursula K. Le Guin, Lorrie Moore, Julia Alvarez, Margaret Atwood and others.

About the Author
Oates: Twice Nominated for the Nobel Prize in literature, JOyce Carol Oates is among the most versatile of our serious writers. Over the past 25 years, she has published numerous books in several genres - short stories, poetry, plays, five books of literary criticism, and children's books. Born in 1938, she is the Roger S. Berlind Distinguished Professor of Humanities at Princeton University. Born in South Africa, Janet Berliner fled her homeland under threat of imprisonment for her outspoken criticism of apartheid. She has served as the editor of a number of well-received anthologies and is presently at work on two novels.

FROM THE CRITICS

Publishers Weekly

Portraits of mothers as nurturing and needy, supportive and critical, sources of humor and wisdom, who, according to Oates's foreword, inspire in their daughters "continual, frustrating speculation," give this collection "an extraordinary range and depth of what the term mother can mean," says South African writer Berliner in her introduction. The editors have gathered 17 stories or excerpts by leading women writers, and by some who are less well known. Some pieces are familiar, like Isabel Allende's lush, evocative "Wicked Girl," where 11-year-old Elena Mejias's sexual awakening is aroused by her mother's attractive boarder. While many selections have been culled from other works, it's satisfying to read a little-known gem from a well-known writer, like Margaret Atwood, whose "Significant Moments in the Life of My Mother" comes from her 1983 novel Bluebeard's Egg. Oates extracts from a recent novel typically spare, disturbing prose describing a suicidal mother picking up her daughter at school. Ursula Le Guin's vision of motherhood in the future, "Solitude," is juxtaposed thematically with Lorrie Moore's reverse chronology in "How to Talk to Your Mother." Jamaica Kincaid, Edna O'Brien, Julia Alvarez, Gloria Naylor and Alice Walker also contribute their unique visions. Equally satisfying selections represent less prominent writers like Jane Shapiro, Katherine Dunn, Martha Soukup, Bette Greene and editor Berliner. Madness, murder, love and guilt are among the topics explored in stories that reveal not just the complex relationships between women and between generations, but also the intelligence and ingenuity of some of today's best writers of short fiction. (Sept.) Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.|

Foreword

No woman wants to hear that she is her mother's daughter, yet she is. Oates and Berliner have collected an album of seventeen candid snapshots of mother-daughter life. These stories, by prominent, international women writers, explore the umbilical connection that threatens to wrap around a daughter's neck long after birth--the same cord she loops and throws high to lasso her mother's love.

The collection is grounded in classics. Lorrie Moore's "How to Talk to Your Mother (notes)" traces a daughter's thoughts of what she can and cannot tell her mother in reverse order from just after her mother's death back to her own birth. The renowned "A Rose in the Heart of New York," by Edna O'Brien, chronicles a daughter's life from the moment her mother, crucifix clenched between her teeth, pushes the girl out to the mother's eventual death without reconciliation. One wonders if the editors, who hint at conversations they had over selection, saw this juxtaposition. More likely, the connection speaks to the universal nature of mother-daughterhood. O'Brien writes, "Her mother's knuckles were her knuckles, her mother's veins were her veins, her mother's lap was a second heaven, her mother's forehead a copybook onto which she traced A B C D, her mother's body was a recess that she would wander inside forever and ever, a sepulcher growing deeper and deeper."

Berliner admits that she mistook Margaret Atwood's "Significant Moments in the Life of my Mother" for autobiography, a cause for some ribbing and a tribute to Atwood's craft. Oates' own "Death Mother" captures the psychotic need-tolerance continuum that exists between mother and daughter, even when that nurturer has grossly abused her ownflesh-and-blood. (Death Mother should never have been fit for childbearing. She reappears in her daughter's life like a gauzy apparition from which the girl must tangibly break free.)

The collection encompasses magical religiosity (Lois Gold), Latin sensual sensibility (Isabel Allende and Julia Alvarez) the pathos of ls the story of the Northridge earthquake of 1994 and how Valentino's owner Piero Selvaggio, who has one of the world's great wine cellars, lost 30,000 bottles of precious, hard-to-find wines. So well loved was he that the Italian wine producers came together and replaced what he had lost.

Most of the recipes are simple and elegant, perfect for a novice. Some require a skilled cook. The instruction and recipe writing are clear and thorough enough that cooks with lesser skills aren't left wandering. O'Connor soothes away culinary worries with expert food photography and lively music.

While the cook plays Funiculi, Funicula she could mince garlic for Sea Bass in Crazy Water or stir the Risotto with Scampi. O Sole Mio could accompany a cook as he assembles the green butter sauce for Pumpkin Cappellacci or Pasta with Rabbit Sauce. The preparation of Little Agnolotti Stuffed with Pheasant would go more smoothly with a Tarantella. The sweet rendition of Santa Lucia might aid digestion and enhance a dessert of Warm Zabaglione Scented with Orange-Muscat Liqueur or Venetian Tiramisu with Vanilla Sauce.

Readers should be forewarned. This book is infectious. All of the recipes in this collection are winners. Paging through this book they will find themselves with Italian fever which has as its symptoms a wild hunger and longing for Italy. Thankfully, Italian music and food seem to alleviate these symptoms. This book and compact disc will give readers not only the disease but also provides the cure.

Boston Globe

Most striking in all the stories is the tenacity of the bond between mothers and daughters...

Kirkus Reviews

The chemistry between mothers and daughters can be loving, lethal, or some blend of both, as Oates and Berliner's firstrate collection of 17 stories (14 published previously) amply illustrates. The contribution by Oates herself is among the most chilling: in"Death Mother," a young woman in college has an unexpected, horrifying visit from her mother, whose madness has kept her institutionalized for years, but after showing her around campus and listening to her insults, the daughter refuses to leave the new life she's made. Jane Shapiro, in"Mousetrap," offers a more loving portrait of a mother, this one an aging, urbane lady of many facelifts who still knows how to wind her daughter up even while lying on the bathroom floor after a fall. But in Margaret Atwood's"Significant Moments in the Life of My Mother," the essential truth that so many stories here reckon with attains a belllike clarity: a mother, for all her familiarity and importance as keeper of her daughter's history is ultimately and profoundly an enigma.