<DIV><p>Praise for Sallie Bingham:</p><p>"Sallie Bingham binds her collection together with sheer talent. The title novella is absolutely first-rate?a skillfully suggestive amalgam of Katherine Mansfield and Eudora Welty. This same unblinking gaze is hard at work on the essential weakness and dependence of men ('The Banks of the Ohio' and 'The Ice Party'), the illusion of freedom that comes with divorce ('Bare Bones'), and the desperate terror of adolescent love ('Winter Term')."?James R. Frakes, <I>The New York Times Book Review</I></p><p>"Sallie Bingham's characters scrutinize their relationships with children, lovers, and their own treacherous souls. . . . Nearly every one of these flinty stories is a tiny masterpiece."?<I>Entertainment Weekly</I></p><p>"Hardened but not compromised by adult life, these luminous stories . . . feature narrators who find mature, often solitary forms of reckoning, and even happiness. . . . There is not a false note in Bingham's striking collection."?<I>Publishers Weekly</I>, starred review</p><p>"These engaging tales span landscape, gender, and age, and readers will treasure Bingham's strikingly perceptive composition and refined, clever flashes of detail and clarity."?<I>Booklist</I></p><p><B>Sallie Bingham</B> published her first novel with Houghton Mifflin in 1961. Since then she has published four collections of short stories, four novels, and a memoir. She was book editor for <I>The Courier-Journal</I> in Louisville, Kentucky, and has been a director of the National Book Critics Circle. She is the founder of The Kentucky Foundation for Women.</p></div>