Of the various genres of classical aggadic literature, the Talmudic “sage stories” are perhaps the most open to literary interpretation using contemporary methods. Other aggadic forms lack parallels in the conventional Western literary canon. Sage stories, in contrast, are short narratives that have much in common with those found in other, more well-studied, literary traditions. The tools of narrative analysis that have been developed by scholars of other literatures can thus be fruitfully applied to these rabbinic sage stories. It is therefore somewhat surprising that despite the proliferation of literary studies on midrash and aggada appearing in English in recent years, the analysis of sage stories has remained a relatively neglected field of inquiry among Anglophone scholars. This field has been dominated by Israeli scholars such as Jonah Fraenkel and Ofra Meir, whose work has appeared largely in Hebrew. Jeffrey Rubenstein's Talmudic Stories: Narrative Art, Composition and Culture and the recent translation of Shulamit Valler's Nashim ve-Nashiut be-sipure ha-Talmud (Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 1993) under the title Women and Womanhood in the Talmud are thus welcome and important additions to the world of English-language rabbinics scholarship.