At the Owl Woman Saloon — Tess Gallagher

Tess Gallagher is best known as a distinguished poet. She also collaborated on the film Short Cuts, based on the short stories of her late husband, Raymond Carver. But in this luminous collection of short stories -- her second -- she establishes herself as a fiction writer of the first order.

Set primarily in the Northwest, where the author was born and has lived for many years, these stories tell how people do more than cope with the hard turns and snares of their lives. We watch them take the unexpected next step as they face their dilemmas. Gallagher invents wholly original characters and renders them with lyrical intensity. As with the great short stories of Flannery O'Connor, Gallagher's prose animates the themes of love, human pain, and healing.