Barnes' fascination with womens' internality - their madness, their melancholy, and their wit - is conveyed so idiosyncratically in these short stories. I feel like her poetic prose lends itself well to the format.

I still very much want to revisit her novel "Nightwood" since I feel it will speak to me now more than it did in my early 20s. I sometimes struggle to drop in or to not rush through short story anthologies, but I got a lot out of savouring these. Some of them are a bit opaque, but that's 19th/20th century modernism, baby.

Her handling of grief in a few of these really stood out for me, the beauty and neurosis of it.