This book was published in 1992 and contained 25 short stories, five each from Sub-Saharan Africa, China, India, Japan and Latin America. Most of the works were written or published in the 1970s and 80s, except the stories for Japan, all but one of which came out originally in the 1950s and 60s. The stories were chosen to showcase major writers from these regions who published after World War II, and whose work was already available in English translation. The compiler was attracted, firstly, to stories that provided insight into the values, pressures, behavior and conflicts of people from other cultures. ("What does it feel like to grow up in Beijing, Bombay, or Buenos Aires? Increasingly, we have become fascinated by the details of daily existence in other cultures and curious about the lives of those whose circumstances and pressures seem so different from our own.") And secondly, to works that transcended individual situations and locations to touch on the shared human condition. Themes in the stories included relationships between family members, men and women, different social or racial groups in a particular society, and artists and society, and the struggle to find a job or overcome poverty, civil strife, repression or imprisonment. The stories from China showed the impact of the Cultural Revolution: three of them contained main characters either banished to the countryside or imprisoned because of it.