Aspects of Nature

Fiction. Women's Studies. Short Fiction. Like the many surfaces of a gemstone, the varied aspects of human experience link the short stories in this collection. Themes of finding one's identity; conflicts of family, career and romance; loneliness, death, loss, and feelings of displacement; youth and aging; courage and fear; human frailty; spirituality; compassion and manifestations of evil, all are at the heart of this collection. The story bearing the collection's name presents a satirical microcosm of our fragmented contemporary society, a candle-lit dinner party of six disparate guests at a cottage on an isolated island at the height of a Gothic storm. In the remaining stories a middle-aged woman confronts a plastic surgeon; an elderly woman offers an amusing account of her inability to assert her desires; a seventy-year-old woman on her death bed makes plans for her next dinner party; a Holocaust survivor fashions random objects into sculptures; a forty-something woman confronts the male medical profession; an aging woman laments loss; a pianist is conflicted by love for her teacher; and a young mother seeks to fathom where her own self has disappeared.