A prolific and widely praised novelist and essayist, Lynne Sharon Schwartz has also won considerable acclaim for her short fiction, most of which has been collected in two volumes: Acquainted with the Night and Other Stories (1984) and The Melting Pot and Other Subversive Stories (1987). As in her novels, the characters in Schwartz's short stories are intelligent, educated, and driven members of the middle class unflinchingly pursuing self-definition, if not necessarily happiness. Along this sometimes profitable, sometimes painful, path, Schwartz vigorously scours away the veneer of her characters' seemingly commonplace lives. Often she exposes raw nerves, long-smothered feelings, and shades of emotional honesty with a comparatively rare psychological explicitness in American fiction. It might be this quality that has hampered her commercial, though not her critical success. As she told Wendy Smith in a 3 August 1984 Publishers Weekly interview, "I really try to get at these things that nobody wants...