Lately, time seems to have taken on an amusing eternal quality. Outer-space time, quick-and-never; a slow wheeling of which Melinda, moving at whatever speed, is more and more aware she has been accorded the briefest, briefest slice. She finds herself now moonwalking through the strange region of not young, not a mother, not married, unlikely to marry. She will have to work until she dies. She will have good friends who'll keep an eye on her, of course; some of them women much like her. She will float toward and finally past the margins of sexual viability, and never have enough money for a facelift.

"What a pleasure to be in the witty, sophisticated world of Joan Frank's fiction. Boys Keep Being Born is a thoroughly delightful and satisfying collection."—Margot Livesey

"Wonderfully constructed, Joan Frank's stories are deeply moving and written with great grace and wit. . . . Boys Keep Being Born is a pleasure to read."—Stephen Dobyns

"In these stories, women encounter the limits of middle age: waning sexual attractiveness, irrevocable decisions regarding motherhood, wandering partners and friends. . . . It is both worldly and stoical, with the fun of verbal and social sophistication and the pain of an acknowledged and irreversible narrative movement toward death. Frank is witty, light, philosophical and meditative by turns. She provides psychological depth for her characters while setting them in the larger context of their social and spiritual milieu. In great lovely swaths of prose, Frank investigates a serious set of problems, and keeps pressing on them until they open up to the universal."—Trudy Lewis

In Boys Keep Being Born, Joan Frank's subject matter is stark; her style, wry and lyrical. Her characters ask point-blank questions of the lives in which, willingly or not, they find themselves. The answers they devise—or settle for—may surprise you.

About the Author

Joan Frank is a writer of short stories and essays that appear in literary reviews and anthologies nationwide. She lives in Santa Rosa, California.