A Dove of the East And Other Stories [Paperback]

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.

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 deeplã*