The late Kathleen Collins’s stories capture moments in everyday lives with humor, poignancy and grace, yet also deal with broader topics such as race, gender, family and sexuality in a very personal, intimate way. Her work integrates the African-American experience in a way that makes her characters into fully-realized human beings, rather than solely vectors for discussing race. Kathleen Collins is the still-unknown contemporary of the lauded female short story writers of the seventies and eighties, women like Laurie Colwin, Ann Beattie, Amy Hempel and Grace Paley. Collins is a true gem, and this discovery of her work is fortuitous in such a wonderful way--her stories are both contemporary and timeless, in a way that only the best literature is.