"Dept. of Speculation is a portrait of a marriage. It is also a beguiling rumination on the mysteries of intimacy, trust, faith, knowledge, and the condition of universal shipwreck that unites us all. Jenny Offill's heroine, referred to in these pages as simply "the wife," once exchanged love letters with her husband, postmarked Dept. of Speculation, their code name for all the uncertainty that inheres in life and in the strangely fluid confines of...

A young girl lists the sixteen things she is not allowed to do anymore, including not being able to make ice after freezing a fly in one of the cubes.

Losing a friend can be as painful and agonizing as a divorce or the end of a love affair, yet it is rarely written about or even discussed. This is the first anthology to address this near-universal experience, bringing together the voices of writers like Francine Prose, Katie Roiphe, Dorothy Allison, Elizabeth Strout, Ann Hood, Diana Abu-Jaber, Vivian Gornick, Helen Schulman, and many others. Some write of friends who have drifted away; others of...