The Way It Works with Women is a brutal and relentless exploration of the dark side of desire. Shocking yet poetic, the novel is composed of bits of dialogue: outbursts and exchanges spoken in the night and expressing naked physical and psychological yearning; murmurs of fragmentary declarations spoken in deserted doorways and dark hotel rooms.

The women of the title - young and old, licentious and inhibited, awkward and uncouth, yet full of grace and innocence - bare their souls to a lone attentive man, a man whose very passivity underscores the strange and powerful freedom derived from their harsh confessions.

With its underpinnings in religious mysticism, Calaferte's erotic excess - sometimes lyrical, often crude, always thought provoking - explores the fear and the vulnerability that seize man in the face of the infinite. And it is this excess that makes The Way It Works with Women such a forceful mediation on the myriad contradictions of the human spirit.