tumultuous marriages to the painter Lucian Freud and poet Robert Lowell, Caroline Blackwood remains a woman whose formidable intellect and artistry indelibly marked every person she met and every sentence she crafted. When he interviewed her a year before her death in 1996, The New York Times chief art critic, Michael Kimmelman, called Blackwood a "strangely dramatic woman: intense and vulnerable, with . . . a dark, razor-sharp sense of humor and an offbeat sensibility."

The same can be said of the mostly female, and often troubled, characters in the stories of this startling new collection. Selections span the entirety of her career, from her first book, For All That I Found There, to Good Night Sweet Ladies, one of her last. The seven evocative nonfiction vignettes draw directly from Blackwood's fascinating life, from her early difficult years through her days as a quintessential bohemian. Three entirely unpublished stories are included in the collection.