This "dazzling collection" of short stories by the World Fantasy Award-winning author of Winter's Talecontemplates the human experience across the globe (The San Francisco Chronicle & Examiner).

In these twenty stories, Mark Helprin offers a series of meditations on some of humanity's most enduring and universal questions. At the hour of his death, an American priest in Rome must choose between his church and his God. A young man finds love in a hot, dirty typewriter-ribbon factory in the Bronx. A Dutch child in a Canadian orphanage carries the pain of war and her love for her family in her heart. An Israeli scout risks the safety and respect of his comrades in an act of transformative charity.

Through beautifully rendered memories and moments of epiphany, "all Helprin's stories deal with essences which lead from the heart…his images are clean and sharp and bright" (Kirkus).

"When you read these stories, a you must, you will, I believe, be uplifted and awed."—Cleveland Plain Dealer