The Body in Four Parts, published in 1993, signalled a renewed awe for the literary stylings of Kauffman, who writes about multiplicity of the mind in this more recent work as if there were no bounds -- psychiatric, scientific, even corporeal. That sense of boundless merging and floating pervades the novel with the searing luster of an expansive mind and honed craft brought fortituously together as one, seamlessly.

So it is with great enthusiasm that we announce, more than ten years after the original 1981 publication of Places in the World a Woman Could Walk, that Graywolf has brought one of Kauffman's earlier works back to a wider readership. Simple beauty, sharp intelligence, and an indefatigable wit shape and infuse every story in this collection. In each work, Kauffman stitches together a central female character who, eventually, no matter what, stands on solid ground. Sometimes it is the dialogue that pieces together these portraits; other times, it's the point of view of a cagey narrator; and, as often as not, the women in these stories arise as much from what Kaufmann does not say, in her graceful style of understatement, as in what we find to lead along on the page.

The staunch heroine of the title piece, Lady, is a bit over-concerned about cows. "Lady Fretts drew herself on with sentiment," the first-person narrator tells us, "She had no reason for anything -- but sure-fire emotion. She'd lived her life like the unblemished blind, by feeling." When a change of events turns Lady's world upside down and inside out, however, a new self emerges, one who can surpass even sentiment. "Lady rode a sofa for years; I should have seen it would be no trouble for her to take it from there," the narrator concludes. "I should have known there would be places in the world a woman could walk, sure-footed, and look powerful."

In "My Mother Has Me Surrounded," the aqueous metaphors pool around the central character, a child re-discovering the wide berth of her mother's reality in remembrance. "My mother," the narrator notes, "is not the distinctly drawn mothers of magazines; she is not clear cut." Instead, this is a mother who loves the sea, and who envelopes her child and husband with a yearning that has become certainty. In this world, her daughter stands little chance of being noticed in her own world. The tender urging in this story brings the two together, and a remarkable woman is again borne to the page.

Like the narrators who can be surprised by the irony of action and complexity of the misunderstood, readers will be drawn in to this quilting of the traditional with its stylized edges, as each woman character in this collection finds her place to walk in the world.

A highly recommended book for any library, as well as for teaching a variety of regional, economic, and communal cultural values.