Wasserstein, who won a Pulitzer Prize and a Tony Award for The Heidi Chronicles, writes of three Jewish middle-aged sisters-Sara, Gorgeous, and Pfeni-who come together in London to celebrate Saraâ€s birthday. Winner of the Outer Critics Circle Award. Photographs.

The graduating seniors of a Seven Sisters college, trying to decide whether to pattern themselves after Katharine Hepburn or Emily Dickinson. Two young women besieged by the demands of mothers, lovers, and careers--not to mention a highly persistent telephone answering machine--as they struggle to have it all. A brilliant feminist art historian trying to keep her bearings and her sense of humor on the elevator ride from the radical sixties to the heartless eighties. Wendy Wasserstein's characters are so funny, so many-sided, and so "real" that we seem to know them from their Scene One entrances, though the places they go are invariably surprising. And these three plays--"Uncommon Women and Others," "Isn't It Romantic," and the Pulitzer Prize-winning "The Heidi" "Chronicles"--Manage to engage us heart, mind, and soul on such a deep and lasting level that they are already recognized as classics of the modern theater.

In plays such as Isn't It Romantic, Uncommon Women and Others, and the Pulitzer Prize-winning The Heidi Chronicles, Wendy Wasserstein put her finger on the pulse of her past-modern, post-feminist sisters and delivered her diagnosis with shrewd good humor and an unerring sense of the absurd. That same engaging sensibility bubbles through the twenty-nine essays in Bachelor Girls, in which Wasserstein presents her observations on: -- Boyfriends -- "The worse the boyfriend, the more stunning your American Express bill." -- Role Models -- "In the forties emulating an ideal woman meant bobbing your hair like Betty Grable's. In the eighties, because of Jessica Lange, women have to get a Pulitzer Prize-winning actor-playwright to fall in love with them, have a child by one of the world's great dancers, be nominated for two Academy Awards, and enjoy doing the laundry alone on a farm." -- Success -- "I knew my friend Patti was a big-time Hollywood agent the first time I saw her dial a telephone with a pencil." Ranging from the dietary secrets of lemon mousse to the politics of the second marriage, with stopovers at a bar mitzvah in Westchester, a chess tournament in Rumania, and a Tokyo production of Isn't It Romantic, Bachelor Girls is pure Wasserstein, which is to say, pure joy. From the Trade Paperback edition.