The House of Breathing by Gail Jones This finely crafted collected of fourteen short stories, the second by Australian writer Gail Jones to appear in the United States, confirms her as a sophisticated writer of profound and distinctive vision. Traversing a broad range of subjects -- cultural imperialism, sexuality, politics, the visionary power of language -- Jones explores the often painful intersections between these issues and the personal lives of her characters. Jones' stories often have the feel of small epics, sweeping in their historical scope yet personal in scale. For example, in "Knowledge", the daughter of missionaries on a remote island is entranced by the exotic world she glimpses in an Audrey Hepburn movie and which she sees symbolized in a pair of white golves that arrive in a bag of donated cast-offs. CL, ISBN: 0807614556 $21.95 (Can: $33.00)