As the title implies, the stories in Truth and Other Fictions turn on the mutable and contested nature of truth, opening with Green is the Most Difficult Colour, a tale set in Picasso's Paris studios and narrated by one of the many young model/lovers the artist exploited over his long run as the city's resident genius/provocateur/dirty old man. The issue of the nature of reality and the ambiguous difficulties entailed in trying to represent it that are introduced in this story resonate through the remaining stories, tales that are set in various locales and decades up to the present. Quoting Picasso, the narrator says: “ ‘If there was a single truth, you couldn't make a hundred paintings of the same subject.' A hundred women, one man. A hundred truths. No truth at all. And you start with something. One woman, one man.” And so it goes throughout this wonderfully written collection of takes on the elusiveness of truth.… The author never sacrifices the particular human reality of her characters to the larger theoretical concerns she invokes, and the persuasiveness of her characterizations and the luminous quality of her visual descriptions of cityscapes and landscapes is strong enough to support her intellectual ambition.