This first collection of short fiction is filled with repressed male characters, mostly in the legal business, who are emotionally buffered by success and propriety. Schlink, a German law professor and judge, "is possessed with a coolly direct manner of interrogating the confused motives of the human heart," Jennifer Schuessler said last year. "The strongest stories...are striking portraits of men waking up belatedly, if incompletely, to the cost of self-deception."-----$13-----Recommended by: MJS