The Woman Who Never Cooked is Mary's collection of linked short stories. The secret of this book is that it is the story of one woman who hides inside the stories and is fully revealed through this tour through her life. Her publisher describes the book this way: Take a dizzying tour of life's betrayals in this tightly linked collection of stories. Rejected by a lover or a husband, having lost a parent, a sibling, some of the characters go a bit mad, make up an imaginary lover, are driven toward sex, toward adultery. All are obsessed with what can be hidden and what cannot because all have been betrayed. And all of them cook as antidote. But what if the woman hidden at the heart of this book discovers one day that she no longer can cook?

• Winner 2004 Mid-List First Series Award for Short Fiction, publication April 2006.

• Grand Prize, Santa Fe Writers Project 2000 Literary Awards, August 2000 (for a smaller group of the short stories "The Burglar" "Sine Die" and "To Swim?" Read these stories in The Woman Who Never Cooked

• "Sine Die" also won The Prentice Hall Fiction Award, and "To Swim" also won The Sherwood Anderson fiction prize. 

• The book has also been chosen by the American Library Association and is available in libraries across the country.
  
  Reviews: “To get to know the heroines of Mary L. Tabor’s The Woman Who Never Cooked, you’ll have to head to the kitchen. Navigating family life, they savor foods that celebrate Jewish culture and identity, like the lemon meringue pie whose riddle of a recipe “The Woman Who Never Cooked” solves in her Talmudic musing, or the challah bread whose family recipe she discovers “under S for Sonya,” a fabled pogrom survivor. The women concoct meals to make peace with their pasts: a hidden pie that might spark infidelity, hot peppered fish to entice an alliance between an aunt and her motherless niece. In these still, witty stories, Tabor sets a rich table.” —Image Journal “It’s the absences that Tabor relies upon—the subject too painful to broach, the person on the bus one sees each day but is afraid to approach—that make these stories stand out. The emotions beleaguering the characters are not secrets, but the ways they cope with the emptiness in their lives are well wrought, unique, and surprising. It’s definitely a challenging recipe for a writer’s debut, one that Mary Tabor accomplishes with the expertise of a more experienced master chef.” —The Mid-American Review “There is a subtle humor here, and an innate wisdom about everyday life as women find solace in cooking, work, and chores. Revealed here are the hidden layers of lives that seem predictable but never are. Reading Tabor’s wry tales, one has the sense of entering the private lives of the women you see everyday on your way to work.” —Booklist This book has an adult sense of wisdom earned through pain, a combination of compassion and narrowed, cold eye, and a clarity of understanding of sexuality I find unique. I loved reading about these women: grown-ups written well are rare. I found the collection richly made, unafraid, full of woundedness and strength. —Frederick Busch Mary Tabor writes with astonishing grace, endless passion, and subtle humor. She moves fearlessly into the troubled hearts of her people to explore the territory of loss and betrayal with unparalleled fervor. She is a magician and an inventor, a master of form whose brilliant sleight of hand leaves the reader joyfully bedazzled. Through the power of her vision and the daring agility of her prose, Mary Tabor dances us to the edge of despair only to spin us tenderly toward the light and the radiant transcendence of love. —Melanie Rae Thon Mary Tabor writes the “new” story—witty, edgy, discontent with shopworn wisdom, passionate about the minutiae that reveal the whole of our crooked character, impatient with the easy answer, and fiercely intolerant of the slop and indifference of writers unconcerned with a decidedly moral universe. —Lee K. Abbott
  
  Mike Czyzniewski on Story366 discusses "The Burglar"—and much more.
  
  Michael Johnson, International Herald Tribune: Mary L. Tabor’s collection of twelve short stories, The Woman Who Never Cooked displays rare knowledge of human behavior in this assemblage of stories covering illness, deaths in the family, adultery, intimacy, dishonesty, dreams, love, family ties, and some surprisingly interesting details about food and how to cook it. These stories display Ms. Tabor’s polished prose page after page. She has a sure touch for subtle humor as well as for rhythm, repetition, metaphor and simile.