cover image Cosmopolis: Urban Stories by Women

Cosmopolis: Urban Stories by Women

. Cleis Press, $24.95 (196pp) ISBN 978-0-939416-36-3

Each of the 22 stories in this strong collection is set in a different city, offering stunning variety in their depiction of urban manners and mores from a female perspective. In Rosalind Warren's ``Auto Repair,'' the major events in a Detroit teenager's life--from her mother's death to love's first heartbreak--take place inside an automobile: ``I love this car,'' she thinks paradoxically. ``Nothing can get me in here.'' Miriam Tlali's ``Fud-u-u-a!'' demonstrates how for Johannesburg blacks even the daily train ride to work becomes a degrading reminder of the double burden of suffering borne by black women. In Rosanna Fiocchetto's pointed tale, ``The Day Rome Went Crazy,'' a great rainbow appears, setting off international folly: Red Square turns green, the White House turns red, and only lesbians welcome the undoing of order. In ``Barcelona Love,'' Maria-Antonia Oliver describes opulence and garbage pickers, crowding and pollution, yet remains constant to the city she adores. Rieder's ( AIDS: The Women ) own ``After Life in Vienna'' is a women's washroom attendant's monologue that clings to hope even when it looks like the city's vitality has been relegated to graves and museums. ( July )