Francine Prose has been praised for the imaginative breadth of her narratives, and her gifts as a traditional storyteller have earned comparisons with such great fabulists as Geoffrey Chaucer and Isak Dinesen (Karen Blixen). But Prose has also received praise for her incisive observations of contemporary behavior and for the funny, frequently biting social satire that these observations occasion. This range of subject matter and technique gives some indication of the versatility of Prose's abilities: versatility that has produced novels, short-story collections, children's books, and many uncollected stories and articles published in major newspapers and in magazines as different as Hudson Review and People, The New Yorker and Redbook, Antaeus and Atlantic Monthly. But the two poles of Prose's narrative strategies-at one end, the traditional folklorist's methods that employ a ranging historical and fantastic imagination, and at the other end the satirist's propensity to cast an uncompromising eye...