Intimate and unforgettable, these eight stories play with themes of great emotional intensity: infatuation, tenderness, resentment, hope. The perceptive gallantry of a man in his early twenties leads an older woman to fall more than a little in love with him. While interviewing a woman painter who boasts about her sexual conquests, a journalist pictures the parts of the city where her husband goes to meet his mistress. A group of nurses play word games that symbolize the more lethal games played at the hospital where they are students. Sparkling, disarmingly honest, these remarkable stories evoke the thrilling and confounding predicament of being human.