SVETLANA ALEXIYEVICH constructs powerful narrative collages out of «live human voices» culled from her interviews with witnesses to and participants in the most shattering national events. Her «Landscape of Loneliness» shows how tragic social circumstances deprive people of ability to experience and enjoy love.MARIA ARBATOVA's frank and witty «My Name is Woman» takes place in an abortion clinic where the heroine reflects on her failed love affair and women's submissive role in love and life.NINA GORLANOVA sets her «How Lake Jolly Came About» in the closed world of a maternity ward. As a new life is born the town is being flooded and the inhabitants are moved to a new location.ANASTASIA GOSTEVA's heroine («Closed Americas») attempts to run away from herself and her unrequited love, which is in fact a desperate effort to come to terms with herself.LUDMILA PETRUSHEVSKAYA's absurd middle-aged heroine (in «Waterloo Bridge») finds she has fallen in love with a character in a movie. Seeing the film again and again, she experiences the romantic love she never had in real life.MARGARITA SHARAPOVA draws on her unique personal experience as a circus animal tamer to juxtapose the small world of the circus to the harsh wide world of today's Russia in her brilliantly crafted «ComFuture».OLGA SLAVNIKOVA depicts a Ural town where most men are involved in the illegal mining and cutting of precious stones. «Krylov's Childhood» combines memorable characters with rich ethnographic detail.NATALIA SMIRNOVA paints a disquieting picture of a provincial town where two cultivated women must survive amidst crude working-class surroundings. Her prose is deep and subtle, but by no means female.LUDMILA ULITSKAYA's «Women's Lies» look at women who lie with verve just to escape dreary reality. Permeated with a tolerant humorous warmth, her stories exemplify that strand in the humanist tradition that neither denounces nor deifies, but attempts to understand human psychology in its infinitely numerous manifestations.