Providence--a city named in the hope that a direct compliment to God might place Him under some sort of obligation to its inhabitants--provides Jean McGarry with the fertile ground of her comic and gritty, harsh and touching cycle of stories. Weaving in and out of Airs of Providence is a novella telling the story of April and Margery Flanaghan, two sisters trying to grow up in this neighborhood and doing only a so-so job of it. And it is a job, in a world not clearly made for anyone, but better suited to an older generation. Surrounded by nuns and priests, uncles and aunts, biddies and oddballs, April and Margery do their best to be normal. They practice their penmanship, babysit, go to a prom, and try to be up to date. But how even to look normal in a world where you are always running up against uncontrollable mood swings, mysterious infirmities, unexplained sorrows?

Over a period of thirty-five years, they sniff out neighborhood scandals, get an "earful" of what the others are up to, and rest secure behind their sets of double curtains in the knowledge that everything human and frail is on the outside, everything blameless and perfect on the inside. If the Airs of Providence are sometimes rough, they are always funny. They may be sad too, but it is a dry-eyed melancholy that is no relation--or perhaps just a poor relation--to the air of "Danny Boy."

A collection of fifteen stories, Jean McGarry's No Harm Done, depicts family life at its worst, best, and funniest, as if the author had conjoined the lunacy of Cold Comfort Farm with the bitter grievances of Dubliners. As the author writes in "Strong Boy," this might be "...because every family, rich or poor, is roughage." The characters, gallant, goofy, gifted, and grim, include sickly mothers of a dozen children, boozy fathers with a gift of the gab, kids aspiring to be nuns and priests, or just to get out of town with a whole skin. A section is devoted to one marriage made in heaven: a Jewish psychoanalyst devoted to his ex-nun wife. Another set of stories reworks familiar fairy tales, setting them in the wild present. No Harm Done (whose title is Irish code for wishful thinking) concludes with a truce to the war between the sexes, and indeed a `solution' to the tragicomedy that is marriage and family.

Since its founding in 1979, the Johns Hopkins Poetry and Fiction series has published forty volumes of short fiction, beginning with Guy Davenport's acclaimed Da Vinci's Bicycle. The series was launched with two guiding principles: to publish works of short fiction exhibiting formal excellence and strong emotional appeal and to publish writers at all stages of their careers.

So the Story Goes gathers the best short fiction of the series, works exhibiting wit, elegance, and wisdom. Writing about a wide variety of subjects and in a multitude of styles, the twenty writers collected here share a mastery of language and an extraordinary ability to entertain.

Ellen Akins from World Like a Knife, "Her Book"Steve Barthelme from And He Tells the Little Horse the Whole Story, "Zorro"Glenn Blake from Drowned Moon, "Marsh"Jennifer Finney Boylan from Remind Me to Murder You Later, "Thirty-six Miracles of Lyndon Johnson"Richard Burgin from Fear of Blue Skies, "Bodysurfing"Avery Chenoweth from Wingtips, "Powerman"Guy Davenport from Da Vinci's Bicycle, "A Field of Snow on a Slope of the Rosenberg"Tristan Davies from Cake, "Counterfactuals"Stephen Dixon from Time to Go, "Time to Go"Judith Grossman from How Aliens Think, "Rovera"Josephine Jacobsen from What Goes without Saying, "On the Island"Greg Johnson from I Am Dangerous, "Hemingway's Cats"Jerry Klinkowitz from Basepaths, "Basepaths"Michael Martone from Safety Patrol, "Safety Patrol"Jack Matthews from Crazy Women, "Haunted by Name Our Ignorant Lips"Jean McGarry from Dream Date, "The Last Time"Robert Nichols from In the Air, "Six Ways of Looking at Farming"Joe Ashby Porter from Lithuania, "West Baltimore"Frances Sherwood from EverythingYou've Heard Is True, "History"Robley Wilson from The Book of Lost Fathers, "Hard Times"

"Home" is the unnamed goal in this collection whose characters are somehow always searching for that ideal state of calm and warmth and perfect tolerance. Of course, that dream is quite unlike the hard world of Providence, where these dreamers really live - a world of wary neighbours and vague priests, of flinty teachers, of parents distant and irascible. Hungering for some better place, these sons and daughters of New England follow very different paths, and make very different - often shattering - discoveries. In "The Raft", a ten-year-old boy struggles with the shock of his father's leap from a ninth-floor window of the failed family business. A middle-aged woman invites her widowed mother to move in with her - and then the two of them must fight it out to see which one of them has made the greater "sacrifice". A high school senior, more interested in boys than in fruit flies, uses her genetics project - "Sex-Linked Traits" - to probe the foibles of her own high-strung family. In "Uncle Maggot", a little girl, unwilling to say goodbye at her father's coffin, shocks the mourners with a very odd performance. Charged with dark humour and dramatic power, the stories in "Home At Last" are crafted with that rare stylistic purity which readers have come to expect from an author whose work the "New York Times" has praised as "deft, comic, and devastatingly precise".