"The house of fiction that B. Elizabeth Beck constructs in Swan Songs is inhabited by people we recognize-a woman fretting about the onset of menopause, an art history graduate working in a diner and trying to hide her identity, a fastidious suburban mom celebrating Christmas in July, a middle-aged wife playing and living out the soundtrack of her life, an abused wife who hopes her husband will 'wind down like a toy with low batteries.' They are none of us, they are all of us. These thirteen stories-many of them more like capsules of memory or character studies-are masterful, treated with minutely imagined details and a deftness that resonates with authenticity and insight, woven with music as only Beck can do." -Richard Taylor, author of Elkhorn: Evolution of a Kentucky Landmark