"Welcome to Black Spring, the seemingly picturesque Hudson Valley town haunted by the Black Rock Witch, a seventeenth-century woman whose eyes and mouth are sewn shut. Muzzled, she walks the streets and enters homes at will. She stands next to children's beds for nights on end. Everybody knows that her eyes may never be opened or the consequences will be too terrible to bear. The elders of Black Spring have virtually quarantined the town by using...

Set in the 1960s, The Dream Room is the story of a family's dissolution, as witnessed through the eyes of twelve-year-old David. An only child, he is fascinated by the culinary arts -- making the family's dinner nightly and reading cookbooks as if they were novels and novels as if they were cookbooks -- content to simply spend time with his mother and father, a pilot during World War II who is now an unemployed engineer. One long, rainy summer, they...

A man of independent means oddly suited to survival amid the chaos of modern life, Inni Wintrop is a committed dabbler, content to casually wander the streets of Amsterdam, follow the dips and rises of the stock exchange and commodities market, speculate in art and love, and write a newspaper horoscope column. But his inconsistencies are interrupted when he meets two men who are the epitome of order and regulation.

A critically acclaimed, award-winning collection drawing sparkling prose from the inspiration of three rivers passing through different times and places. On the storm-swollen Aisne in northeastern France, an alcoholic actor combats both his demons and nature's tempests. Along the Main and Rhine in Germany, a kindhearted logger has but one wish: to travel with the lumber from his small Franconian hometown to the end of the river in the Netherlands,...

Geesje de Jonge crossed the ocean at age seventeen with her parents and a small group of immigrants from the Netherlands to settle in the Michigan wilderness. Fifty years later, in 1897, she's asked to write a memoir of her early experiences as the town celebrates its anniversary. Reluctantly at first, she soon uncovers memories and emotions hidden all these years, including the story of her one true love. At the nearby Hotel Ottawa Resort, 23-year-old...

A visit to the newly-widowed sister of the Commissaris of the Amsterdam police in Maine shows that her husband's death was no accident.