With a background in English/Creative Writing, Hart has taught writing, been a director of a national writers' conference, and an editor of a literary magazine. She discusses the psychological and feminist implications in "The Hitchhiking Game."

Issues of power and identity are recurring themes in most of Milan Kundera's writings. Having been expelled by a communist regime from his homeland, Czechoslovakia, after his novel The Joke was published, Kundera often writes about these issues within a political framework. Just as often, Kundera also plays out these themes while exploring the personal and sexual relationships between his main characters. A good example of this occurs in his short story "The Hitchhiking Game ."

The story, much like the road down which the characters travel, twists and turns around questions of authority, sexuality, and self, stopping not at conclusive answers, but rather stopping only out of sheer exhaustion and...