SOURCE: "A Man and the Idea of a Woman," in The New York Times Book Review, August 21, 1988, p. 11.

In the following favorable evaluation of Palm-of-the-Hand Stories, Ury notes that each of the pieces in the volume is "less a story in the usual sense than a node of storytelling, where sounds, textures, tastes, colors, trajectories and intimations are gathered, ready to expand over an invisible canvas. "

A woman, breaking with her married lover, gives him a pair of canaries as a memento of their affair. The birds, which initially had been placed in the same cage by the bird seller through chance and are now unable to survive without each other, come to symbolize for the lover his relationship with his wife, who had cared for the birds and averted her eyes from his affair. Now that she is dead, the husband writes to his former mistress asking...