Gigolo is a collection of short stories by Edna Ferber, best known for her novels Show Boat and So Big (for which she won the Pulitzer Prize). Like most of her works, these stories take place in the heart of the country – the Midwest, from Illinois to Oklahoma. Her protagonists range from a twenty-something auto mechanic to a woman who finds herself “suddenly sixty.” In these stories we meet many strong women facing – and generally conquering – difficult circumstances. (“Having made the worst of it, you made the best of it,” she writes in The Sudden Sixties, one of the stories in this collection.) But she write also of men’s struggles with the rapidly changing social politics of the early 1900’s, showing how various characters resist, but ultimately move with a time in which women are gaining unprecedented power and influence of women from the home to the workplace. Her stories are about real people; her characters are familiar to the reader, even a century after she created them. Her writing is clear, crisp, emotionally evocative, and always humorous. - Summary by Kirsten Wever