INTERESTING WOMEN: STORIES (2008)

At first Lee's collection seems like it was meant for the rich and worldly. An expatriate buys her Italian husband a night with two glamorous prostitutes for his birthday; a young ad exec in Milan surrounds herself with model friends and wealthy dinner companions. Regular folks, read on. While Lee, a regular in O. Henry anthologies, strings her stuff together with women who don't hurt for cash or looks, these stories are really about feeling foreign -- in one's own skin, with one's own gender, in a native or borrowed country. In ''Brothers and Sisters Around the World,'' one of the collection's sharpest reads, an American black woman slaps the face of an island girl for sniffing around her man. But ''the man -- my European husband -- was just an excuse, a playing field for our curiosity.''