Reading a book of short stories is like going on a touring holiday. You pass through many places: some you linger in, others you only catch a fleeting glimpse of, some you remember forever, others you've forgotten almost as soon as you leave.

Cutting The Night In Two (New Island, £10.99), a collection of 34 stories, published in June, gathers a story each from many well-known Irish women writers - Elizabeth Bowen, Mary Lavin, Edna O'Brien, Claire Boylan, Mary O'Donnell, Mary Morrissy, Anne Enright and Claire Keegan - and mixes them with works from lesser-known writers, among them Blβnaid McKinney, Nora Hoult, Emma Cooke, M.J. Hyland and Bridget O'Connor.

All the stories have appeared in other anthologies or collections of short stories by the individual authors; the editors see their job in compiling such a collection - the first in 10 years - as marking out the history of the genre.

Although the themes are diverse, the core of the stories is human relationships: a student's infatuation with her Italian teacher, the holiday "friendships" of two Irish couples who meet in Greece, short affairs, long affairs, the meditations of an empty nester, a woman leaving her husband to live with her lesbian lover and the culture clash between a middle-class childless couple and the working-class teenager they foster.

Whether on the beach or at home, these stories will bring you on a journey, tuning you in to the "communal unconscious" that, in their introduction, Evelyn Conlon and Hans-Christian Oeser muse fiction is all about.