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by Mark Helprin (Author)
The twenty stories here, many of which first appeared in The New Yorker and have since been anthologized throughout the world, are strikingly beautiful essays on enduring and universal questions: In Rome, in the hour of his death, and American priest must choose between his Church and his God. An Israeli scout risks the safety and respect of his comrades in an act of transfiguring gentleness and charity. In a hot, dirty typewriter ribbon factory in the Bronx, a young man finds love. A Dutch child in a Canadian orphanage carries in her heart, her love for her parents and the pain of war. A soldier is overpowered by his days of burying the dead. A Sicilian widow meditates on the end of her family line. These twenty stories are strikingly beautiful pieces on enduring, universal questions by a writer the San Francisco Review of Books calls "a master crafter of the short story."
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When you read these stories, as you must, you will, I believe, be uplifted and awed. - The Cleveland Plain Dealer
These twenty stories are strikingly beautiful essays on enduring and universal questions. In Rome, in the hour of his death, an American priest must choose between his Church and his God. In a hot, dirty typewriter ribbon factory in the Bronx, a young man finds love. A Dutch child in a Canadian orphanage carries in her heart the pain of war and her love for her family. A Sicilian widow meditates on the end of her family line. An Israeli scout risks the safety and respect of his comrades in an act of transfiguring gentleness and charity. In these and the fifteen other stories, "the author's special capacity is the transmission of values as the unspoken and underlying dramatic force of his fiction" (Harper's Magazine).
"A dazzling collection." - The San Francisco Examiner & Chronicle
"Mark Helprin writes with ease and sureness . . . with a compassionate understanding and a clean, lucid prose . . . that is all too rare in our fiction." - The New York Times Book Review
"A kind of genius" (The Spectator), "Helprin has total command of his imagined world in these stories of astonishing scope and power" (The Chicago Tribune).
Educated at Harvard, Princeton, and Oxford, Mark Helprin served in the Israeli army, Israeli Air Force, and British Merchant Navy. He is the author of, among other titles, Refiner's Fire, Ellis Island and Other Stories, Winter's Tale, A Soldier of the Great War, Memoir from Antproof Case, The Pacific and Other Stories, and Freddy and Fredericka.
