Humorous rather than realist stories are the most memorable: Rebekah Clarkson’s ‘A Simple Matter of Aesthetics’, with its finial-hating protagonist, Matthew Gabriel’s ‘To My Son’, which opens, ‘It is not your fault that you are ugly … ’, and Rachael Mead’s paramedical ‘Pissing Blood for Lucy Liu’ are the witty high points. However, while most stories have potential, many authors try to self-consciously squeeze ‘beauty’ into their stories, and this compromises their work. An anthology with no theme would have been preferable. However, Lynette Washington has done a commendable job reining in the stories so that they are all succinct narratives. Perhaps the reader should heed Castro’s request not to ‘look at names invidiously but sample the way these works accrue in an interior dialogue’. With this in mind, I am relieved that this dialogue is not pretentious, nor does it strive to be avant-garde, like some of the work that comes out of the academy. For these reasons, Breaking Beauty is a good book with some excellent stories.