These stories amount to something more than a celebration of the holidays dotting our calendars from month to month. Even though holidays can occasion a return to the familiar, these stories challenge traditional associations. Each story serves to complicate how we observe the human observation of holidays and offers a nuanced understanding of related themes such as family and motherhood, travel, grief and mourning processes, and memory. More generally, holidays are days of observance, and that aspect alone offers a lot to unpack.

Molly Giles's engaging collection of stories was the winner not only of the Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction but also of the 1985 San Francisco Bay Area Book Reviewers Association (BABRA) Award for Fiction and the 1986 "Boston Globe" Fiction Award. Many of the stories in "Rough Translations" have been anthologized and adapted for radio performance.

A master of the complexities of language, Molly Giles writes of the missed connections in life and of the rough translations that we employ when we try to convey, through words and gestures, what we are thinking and what we want from our loved ones.