In gritty, penetrating prose, the short stories in THE WINDOW IS A MIRROR deftly mine both working-class and privileged sensibility to extract common elements. Characters of varying social strata are subjected to merciless scrutiny as they pursue prizes of dubious value, heedless of cost. Whether or not they get what they want is the least of their problems. In the end their disparate futilities mix them into a single tribe that looks like us.