Jill Dawson and Margo Daly eds.: Gas and Air: Tales of pregancy, birth and beyond

By MARGIE THOMSON

"Birth, and copulation and death. That's all the facts, when you come to brass tacks," said T.S. Eliot. As the editors of this compelling collection point out, literature has the other two pretty well covered - but what about birth? Making up for lost time, they've got some very good writers to put their memories of this most exciting, harrowing, happy, sad of occasions, the birth of a child, and the months leading up to it.

Emily Perkins' is one of the most memorable, constructing a sense of her marriage relationship, her hopes and fears for their new child, and some frightening feelings left over from her own childhood; Nick Hornby's is incredibly sad, as he and his wife come to terms with the autism of their new child; Peter Carey's is moving as he must simultaneously prepare for a new life, at the same time as facing his wife's serious illness. The stories are as varied as human experience itself.

Bloomsbury

$27.95