Fiction. What a joy these stories are! Spun from the stuff of everyday life, they are carefully constructed, lovingly sewn, and touched here and there by the miraculous. Mary Helen Stefaniak knows her craft, and she is a wonderfully humane writer. These are transformative tales. Like the woman in The Dress from Bangladesh, we slip into them, expecting the same old thing, and suddenly we shiver all over, as if touched by an electric tingle. The world around us is the same but we are changed, our awareness heightened, our empathy renewed (Sharon Oard Warner, author of LEARNING TO DANCE AND OTHER STORIES).