PEN/Faulkner Award

In six unforgettable, incantatory sections, the novel traces their new lives as "picture brides": the arduous voyage by boat, where the girls trade photos of their husbands and imagine uncertain futures in an unknown land ... their arrival in San Francisco and the tremulous first nights with their new husbands ... backbreaking toil as migrant workers in the fields and in the homes of white women ... the struggle to learn a new language and culture ... giving birth and raising children who come to reject their heritage . . . and, finally, the arrival of war, and the agonizing prospect of their internment.

As a 41-year-old man confronts his own mortality in this collection's title story, he recalls his Spokane Indian father's chilling death from alcoholism and diabetes. Another tale features an eccentric salesman pursuing a married woman from airport to airport. And then there's the film editor who sees nothing wrong with altering footage to fit preconceived views--until he becomes the target of media distortion.