The modern tales in Stories to Hide From Your Mother provide directions for conduct in a difficult world, filled with hysterical wedding parties, abusive lovers, and judgmental mothers. In Stories to Hide From Your Mother, the body plays a central role--a site of lurid spectacle and misplaced lust; and the various characters--a woman who obsesses over a young man on a bus, another who regularly confronts her lover's wife in dreams--wear their moral ambiguities on their sleeves as sacrificial signs of life.

The women in Fragoulis' intense, visceral stories are outsiders--social outlaws redeemed by their fixations and temptations, informed and infested by tradition, etiquette, and transgressive fluids.

Fraught with danger, these Stories to Hide From Your Mother will leave you shaking to the core.