Fresh Girls and Other Stories

February 27, 1995
Six years after the publication of Runaway, Lau's memoir of her years as a suicidal teenage prostitute and drug addict, comes this now 23-year-old author's fiction debut: 10 grim and powerful short stories about women whose loveless lives are controlled by sex, from prostitution to sadomasochism. In the title story, the 19-year-old narrator, a prostitute, knowingly explains why clients prefer the oldest profession's newest girls and worries about her upcoming 20th birthday and being washed up in the business within a couple of years. In ``The Session,'' narrated in the third person, Mary fantasizes about the romantic evening with her boyfriend that she hopes will follow her dominatrix session with a client intent on being abused. In ``Fetish Night,'' Sabrina watches a man be brutally whipped by his lover in an underground club, and then becomes more than a voyeur when she climbs atop an anonymous male ``slave'' and digs her boots into his side. The author of three poetry collections (In the House of the Slaves), Lau employs sensuously described images and melodic prose to soften the brutal, very realistic encounters she describes in these poignant stories, which speak eloquently of loneliness, rage, despair and other raw emotions.