Jane Avrich explores the perils of desire in these fifteen brilliant stories. Here are characters irresistibly attracted to excess — material, emotional, spiritual — who must in the end choose between a life of self-indulgence and a life of self-control. The results are both disastrous and uplifting, and often wickedly funny. Throughout The Winter Without Milk are reimagined characters from literature and history — Oedipus, Lady Macbeth, Scheherezade, for example — as well as everyday people who want more. Avrich's writing ranges from whimsical to cerebral. She pays homage to everyone from Kafka to Keats to Sophocles but is very much an original and a major new talent in contemporary fiction.