In her new collection of short stories, Louisa Ermelino (PW's reviews director) returns to some of the materials that have engaged her imagination across her three earlier novels. The 16 stories in Malafemmena, which will be published by Sarabande Books in August, invoke a range of experiential material: seat of the pants bohemian travel though Asia, India and Australia; love affairs; all manner of illicit drugs; and the vividly articulated street bio of New York Italian Americans in the Greenwich Village of the 1950s and 1960s.

Her prose recreates the tough talk, dysfunctional families, and bleakly comic small time wise guys that drift along the periphery of street life. But it's really the lives and antics of women as they deal with other women—be they older women on the stoops of Sullivan and Thompson Streets, or devil-may-care female drifters meandering from country to country, from one soon-to-be discarded man to another —that animate her intricately emotional stories. She talked to PW about writing short fiction, her relationship to her subjects, and more.

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Source: http://www.publishersweekly.com/