Beautiful Women

A woman spies her husband touching their maid and flings herself from a balcony in the first of 18 vignettes making up Giuseppe Antonio Borgese's Beautiful Women (trans. from the Italian by John Shepley). Elsewhere, a striking girl falls into a river and drowns; a man has a falling-out with a good friend over a woman. First published in the 1920s, the stories describe wives, mothers and lovers, often with a melancholy fervor echoed in such lush descriptions as ""the full moon of May was like a sun dimmed by sleep, a white sun of dreams.""