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." "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. Mark Helprin  is the acclaimed author of Winter's Tale, A Soldier of the Great War, The Oceans and the Stars, Freddy and Fredericka, The Pacific, Ellis Island, Memoir from Antproof Case, and numerous other works. His novels are read around the world, translated into over twenty languages. HE HAD tried to explain for his sons the sense of mountains so high, sharp, and bare that winds blew ice into waves and silver crowns, of air so thin and cold it tattooed the skin and lungs with the blue of heaven and the bronze of sunshining rock crevasse. He had tried to tell them of the house in which he had lived, made of mountain rock, with terraces, and ten fires within-when shutters were thrown open and hit the stone like the report of a shell in an echoing valley he could see mountains of white ice two hundred miles distant. The eggs there were milk-white, the milk like cloud. In winter it often snowed in one day enough to trap and kill horses and bulls. He had been a sawyer, guiding his saws through countless timbers all day long in the open air, so that his body was as intensely powerful as (he would say) gunpowder in a brass casing. Then, when he was younger and worked at the timbers, he could by the pressure of his hands and arms break a heavy iron chain. And there was not much else, at least as he thought of it twenty and more years later. These things were so deep and wonderful that they could bear telling a thousand times a thousand times. But he could not say them even once to his sons, for they did not know Persian, which he had almost forgotten, and his Hebrew was of the shacks and hot streets and blood-guttered markets. This life of his came to be like the fall of an angel, and yet by the tenets of his belief he believed himself lucky. He had come alone from Persia's mountainous north, where the air was cross-currented and symphonically clear, to Tel Aviv where air was obsolete and the entire city heated like potters' kilns in Iran. When in late 1948 he had stepped off a small ship in Jaffa, he had said to himself, Najime, it will be profitable to find the large oven which heats up the city, for there they are undoubtedly drying vast amounts of wood, and may need me to saw. For several hours he had glided about the city in his boots of fur and leather asking passers-by in Persian, "Where is the great oven?" The passers-by, obviously ignorant of Persian, jaded by the sight of ambulant wolflike lunatic-looking Persians and Turcomans, would throw up their