The events of 1989 that brought an end to the so-called East Bloc may have increased women's opportunities to write and publish, or at least changed the circumstances under which they do so. Still writing from a certain historical and cultural margin, these women from East Central Europe have begun to explore a new freedom whose fruits are displayed to exhilarating effect in this book-a freedom to experiment, to innovate, to create a literature uniquely expressive of their world. This volume for the first time allows English-speaking readers to discover the pleasures of these women's writing.

A rich compendium of fiction by twenty-five women from eighteen different nations ranging from Lithuania to Ukraine to Poland, the Czech Republic, Romania, Albania, and Slovenia, The Third Shore brings to light a whole spectrum of women's literary accomplishment and experience virtually unknown in the West. Gracefully translated, and with an introduction that establishes their political, historical, and literary context, these stories written in the decade after the fall of the Iron Curtain are tales of the familiar-of illness and death, love and desire, motherhood and war, feminism, and patriarchy-reconceived and turned into something altogether new by the distinctive experience they reflect.