Is there such a thing as women's literature -- books that authorize a unique take on life, as opposed simply to literature penned by women, work tinged with female sensibilities?
The relationships in Leza Lowitz's new collection of stories are concerned less, perhaps, with questions of gender than between differing states of existence. Lowitz writes a private type of fiction in which the shadowed thoughts of her characters are articulated in whispers and hushed subtleties; quiet disclosures easily missed by the inattentive.
Lowitz's stories circle around the great themes of language, ritual, death and dissolution, unfolding with the candor and intimacy of an unexpurgated journal or pillow book. The outside world may hum and thrum in the background, but it is the private riddles and rituals, the carefully concealed lives of her characters that we attend to.