Kepner's selection shows the many ways fiction has mirrored the lives of Thai women over the twentieth century. The spectrum is broad, encompassing the young and the old, the rural and the cosmopolitan, the privileged and the poor. Some writers address previously unacceptable themes: female sexuality, spousal abuse, gender oppression. Others display a scintillating sense of humor. They touch on many themes--injustice, the heartlessness of society, loneliness, the difficult choices that life presents. Susan Kepner's lyrical, faithful translations preserve the tenor and resonances of these...

Translator Susan F. Kepner makes these tales available for the first time to English-language readers. She introduces the tales with a lively discussion of the writer and her context, retells the plotline of the classical Ramakian, and then presents the translated tales, in which the demon king, contrary to expectation, is a most gentle and endearing demon. Finally, she reveals the humor embedded in these tales of family life, and in Sida's, or Everywoman's, marriage to the demon king.