Merrill Joan Gerber is a distinguished writer of short fiction whose work has won honors such as The Sewanee Review Andrew Lytle Fiction Prize (1985), an O. Henry Award (1986), and the Pushcart Press Editor's Book Award (1990). She has published five volumes of short stories, as well as five novels for adults, a memoir, and nine novels for young adults. Gerber's realistic style is often painfully honest and sardonically humorous. Her work is known for its percep tive observations about family relations, particularly in Jewish families, and ab out the changing lives of women during the second half of the twentieth century. Her 1998 volume of short stories, Anna in Chains, was published as part of the Syracuse University Press Library of Modern Jewish Literature, which also includes works by distinguished writers such as Cynthia Ozick, Tova Reich, Daniel Stern, and Arthur Miller. In 1993, when she presented Gerber the 1992 Hadassah Magazine...