"This volume celebrates the same marriage as seen over a lifetime--a complete "marriage cycle"--beginning with a newly revised Birth and After Birth, Howe's surreal comedy about the early years of child-raising, which asks whether one has to bear a child in order to be a woman; to Approaching Zanzibar, which follows the adventures of a family of four as they embark on a hair-raising road trip to visit a dying relative; to One Shoe Off, when the children, now grown, have left home, leaving their parents to fend for themselves in a house that's slowly sinking into the ground; to the sunset years of Rembrandt's Gift, where magic and time travel do battle with the terrors of old age."--Back cover.