[Stories] offers Lessing's most characteristic voices, moods, preoccupations. Stories such as "The Habit of Loving," "The Other Woman," "A Man and Two Women," "How I Finally Lost My Heart," reveal by their titles the emphasis on the remorses and dislocations of desire. The tone is never strident, often acutely ironic (though rarely humorous), as Lessing details the subtler losses attendant upon growing up, growing old, shedding the illusions of love, and confronting the limits of passion. Her "love" stories are anti-sentimental, wry vignettes that often focus on somewhat curious groupings—people who simply don't dovetail in the traditional pairings. (p. G5)

The stories in this mood yield insights into the social rituals that frame relationships between the sexes and the generations….

Not all of these stories are about failures of illusion or affection. Several explore important rites of passage…. The singular science-fiction story, "Report on the Threatened City," conveys—through the perspective of extraterrestrial beings visiting earth to warn of catastrophe—the author's more recent apocalyptic voice, which expresses her impatience with the myopia of human beings who ignore the signs of their culture's destruction….

Reading these stories, one can locate the themes and qualities that make Doris Lessing a central figure in this generation's fiction. Her oblique vision provides ironic, psychologically astute, and unsparing exposures of the social masks and false expectations governing human relationships; of the critical moments in the slow growth of emotional knowledge through experience; and of an essentially tragic, sometimes even weary sense of despair that life is so intractable. Her always credible characters, both male and female, are defined by longing, by the emotional compromises constructed to bridge the gap between illusion and actual experience.

The emotional pitch of the stories in this volume is understated but utterly persuasive. Lessing's fiction evokes neither laughter nor tears; instead, it makes you feel the blunt ache of knowledge paid for by loss that only occasionally yields solace. (p. G8)