Magical Encounters

This collection of twenty short stories tells how everyday people sometimes encounter magic: A young woman discovers that her secondhand cellphone is haunted; a homeless man's encounter with a garden gnome changes his life; three older women use their societal invisibility to rescue a little girl from a horrifying fate, and a god from Olympus disguised as a human offers a young gay man a way to escape the home town that scorns him. Three of the stories recount the doings of the International Tarts Society, a group of young women whose mission is to save the world through sex. Although they execute their mission with enthusiasm, their yearly conference affords them the vacation break they all enjoy.