SOURCE: “Five Women and One Man,” in Hudson Review, Vol. XLVI, No. 4, Winter, 1994, pp. 765–72.

In the following excerpt, Phillips judges What Remains to be “an uneven volume,” but concludes that it is a welcome collection of Wolf's short fiction.

When The Quest for Christa T. was published in 1970, I recall discussing with friends the brilliance of this new “girl” writing in Germany. Her jacket photograph seemed to depict a teenager. It is with some surprise one realizes that Christa Wolf is sixty-four today, the author of seven books, and that the new photographs resemble Golda Meir. What Remains purports to collect her short fiction, from the early work in the 1960s to the title story, recently published in Germany and the subject of some debate there. (Strangely missing from this collected stories is “Divided Heaven,” Wolf's long story published in 1963, about a working woman who prefers East Germany...