What makes Gordimer's short stories more accessible in my opinion is that she reaches out beyond the regional or the parochial in her choice of subject. Her stories are not fastened to any specific place and her characters display a vast array of human nature. In Beethoven was one-sixteenth black, the lead story in this same-named collection, she offers up a former white anti-apartheid activist, who seeks to establish a racial identity with the indigenous population by hoping to find somewhere a former African ancestor.

She displays a dark sense of humor by letting a tapeworm narrate his life story in Tape Measure that recalls its cycle of life, and its disappointment in his host, who is determined to get rid of it. But, oh, sweet revenge. It will return somewhere else through one of its eggs. Or at least so it believes.

I am sure we have all met a similar character she brings to life in A frivolous Woman, more about a son's reaction to an old trunk of filled with his dead mother's fancy dress costumes that revealed a good-time girl even when she lived in less than fortunate circumstance.

In The Beneficiary a young woman discovers after her actress-mother's sudden death that her good relationship with her father has nothing to do with DNA. In History she entertains the reader with the comments, not always desirable, by a parrot at a French restaurant. And, Gregor, turns out to be a cockroach, who makes itself visible behind her computer screen.

The final stories, Alternative Endings, is exactly that, a story in which Gordimer regales us with how writers sometimes—I venture to say not always—make arbitrary choices in how to end their stories.

This is definitely a book that makes perfect reading on those nights or days, when a little diversion is needed, but a novel won't do. Beautifully written, it shows off Gordimer, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, as the master she is, even when some of her stories are mere sketches, as in this book.