Table of Contents

The Tao of Humiliation

What Doesn't Kill You Makes Me Stronger

The Live One

You Know You've Made It When They Hate You

The Undressed Mirror

La Belle Dame Sans Professeur

The Bottled Mermaid

Fly Me to the Moons

The Swan Princess

Will Anyone Ever Know Me

Bashful

My Temple

Escape from the Dark Forest

The Ideal Reader

Beyond The Yellow Wallpaper

Touch Us

Let Go

The Floating Woman

The Last Satyr

"The Strange Heart Beating Where It Lies"

Alternately chilling, funny, devastating, and hopeful, these twenty stories introduce us to a theater critic who winds up in a hot tub with the actress he routinely savages in reviews; a biographer who struggles to discover why a novelist stopped writing; a woman who searches through her past lives to recall a romantic encounter with the poet W. B. Yeats; a student who contends with her predatory professor; and the poignant scenario of the last satyr meeting his last woman.

Writer-in-residence and a professor of English at Lafayette College, Lee Upton is author of twelve books of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry.

Lee Upton is the author of twelve other books, including the novella The Guide to the Flying Island, and a collection of essays about writing, Swallowing the Sea: On Writing & Ambition Boredom Purity & Secrecy. Her poetry has appeared in editions of The Best American Poetry and has been included in numerous anthologies as well as in The New Republic, American Poetry Review, The Atlantic, Harvard Review, New England Review, Poetry, and other magazines. More than three dozen of her short stories have been published, appearing in such journals as Antioch Review, Epoch, Short Fiction (England), Redivider, Northwest Review, Shenandoah, and Ascent. She has published more than fifty articles and essays about literature. Her awards include: the Lyric Poetry Award and The Writer/Emily Dickinson Award from the Poetry Society of America; the Pushcart Prize; the National Poetry Series Award; the Georgia Contemporary Poetry Series Award; the BOA Short Fiction Prize; and the Mary Louise VanArtsdalen Prize for Scholarship, the Marquis Teaching Award, and the Jones Faculty Lecture Award at Lafayette College, where she is the Writer-in-Residence and a professor of English.