Love's Body, Dancing in Time by L. Timmel Duchamp

Duchamp's intelligent tales of otherworldly experience are literary science fiction that is hard-hitting with a velvet glove. She paints disturbing images in lovely words. Sexual distress underlies most of the stories, but is handled uniquely in each case, revealing just how complex a thing human sexuality really is.

The first story, "Dance at the Edge", features an obsession with a loved one, but its special significance lies more in the idea of "the edge", itself, as a concrete analogy for that ineffable something that spell binds those few blessed (or cursed) to perceive it when others do not. "The Apprenticeship of Isabetta di Pietro Cavazzi" and "The Heloise Archive" are empowering stories of women overcoming their exploitation by lovers through their own, intrinsic superiority, expressed in deep and subtle ways. "The Gift" is a beautifully ambiguous look at suppressed sexuality, couched in a cleverly drawn portrayal of a gender role reversal in which the worldly interloper who perturbs a flawed paradise is female, and the innocent she seeks to liberate is male.

A minor quibble concerns the length, or perhaps the amount of repetition, in "The Heloise Archive", however authentic the voice for the historical setting and the vehicle of telling the story through letters. I rather enjoyed the footnotes, however, and the arc of the whole tale.

Over all, I agree with Samuel R. Delany's endorsement of Duchamp's work: her stories "elicit the thrill of ideas struggling to manifest as pure drama". I recommend them to any reader with an interest in sexual excesses and limitations, who values a painful and humanizing treatment of subjects that might otherwise be merely titillating.