From Booklist Levin writes of lesbian life, love, lust, and spiritual yearnings. She evokes erotic bubble baths, life in the Israeli Army, casual sex with a woman met in a Laundromat in Spain, and a woman who pulls together her life and her family's lives as she trains to run a marathon. Throughout, she conjures a memorable portrait of the lesbian as a perennial outsider who is part of but not fully integrated into her family, no matter how comfortable other family members are with her homosexuality. Ultimately, Levin's book of probings of the spaces and places separating persons from one another remind us all of our essential, existential loneliness. Whitney Scott Product Description Stories deal with a lesbian encounter at a laundromat in Spain, experiences in the Israeli army, a woman preparing to run the marathon whose training changes her life and her family, and the loneliness of being a perpetual outsider From Library Journal Levin (The Sea of Light, LJ 12/92) started writing these stories 20 years ago but couldn't find a publisher for them. No doubt some of the provocative sexual content made them hard to sell. Yet it would be a mistake to read this group of stories, most of which are tales of pickups and sexual encounters between women, solely as women's erotica?other dreams and desires percolate beneath the surface. Levin's writing is forceful and provocative, drawing readers into the center of a story immediately, as though it were the eye of a hurricane. Whether it's a laundromat in "A Room, in a Stone House, in Spain," the lobby of a plush hotel in "La Bruja," or the locker room of a college pool in "The Butterfly," the scenes, sights, smells, and sounds are vivid and believable. The raw emotions and edginess that well up out of the stories in this book make for solid, sensitive reading. Recommended for large fiction collections.?Lisa S. Nussbaum, Euclid P.L., Ohio Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information