COMING TO TERMS: A Literary Response to...

COMING TO TERMS: A Literary Response to Abortion edited by Lucinda Ebersole and Richard Peabody (The New Press: $10; 183 pp., paperback original). The 14 writers in this anthology explore a wide range of emotions in short stories and excerpts from novels. The regretful narrator of Fyodor Sologub’s “The Kiss of the Unborn” imagines the son she might have had (“At least I will give you this life”), while the small-town waitress in “Night Story” by Babs H. Deal declares, “You can’t see why on earth I don’t want a drooling, sloppy baby slung on one hip while I dish hash with the other hand.” In “Cora Unashamed,” the most touching work in the collection, Langston Hughes reveals the complex feelings of an Afro-American woman who sees her own child succumb to whooping cough and the daughter of her employers die from a botched abortion.