Over the past ten years, Gilchrist fans have enjoyed glimpses of headstrong, redheaded Rhoda in five previous collections. Here, for the first time, are the collected Rhoda stories - including two new ones - offering a full-blown portrait of a woman worth waiting for: one of contemporary literature's most enchanting characters, in all her wicked glory.

With a high libido and reckless courage to match, Rhoda is one of those irresistible people who never hold back or take convention too seriously. In these twenty-three stories, arranged chronologically, we follow Rhoda from a precocious kid with a movie-star complex to a coed who makes love to a fraternity boy, and the next week elopes with him, to a middle-aged writer looking for a fling in the age of AIDS.

Ellen Gilchrist's RHODA spans a life few would dare to live.