Twin Peaks

Brecasts rarely get a fair shake in this culture. But The Breast: An Anthology, due out in October from Global City Press, is more than just another volume to bury your face in this fall. A collection of writing from such well-knowns as Nora Ephron, Italo Calvino, and Barbara Ehrenreich, as well as newer writers, it covers everything from breast size to the care and feeding of these high-profile glands. Ephron's 1972 classic, "A Few Words About Breasts," for instance, is a wry confession. "After I went into therapy," she writes, "[it became] possible for me to tell total strangers at cocktail parties that breasts were the hang-up of my life." Has the now considerably more famous Ephron gotten over it? Only her fitter knows for sure.

The question facing the editors, of course, was how to avoid the inevitable titters such a topic could prompt. "We didn't want works that referred to the breast as a piece of fruit or a domestic animal," says Susan Thames, who edited the book with Marin Gazzaniga and Heather Ramsdell. "We wanted to create a book that rescued the breast from these associations." Then, too, they had to deal with the unignorable topic of cancer. Yet even when the subject turns as frightening as that, the anthology remains, well, uplifting.

JAN BRESLAUER