This exquisite prose debut from prize-winning poet Cynthia Zarin is a poignant exploration of the author's experiences with love, work, and the surprise of time's passage.
Zarin charts the shifting and complicated parameters of contemporary life and family in writing that feels nearly fictional in its richness of scene, dialogue, and mood. The writer herself is the marvelously rueful character at the center of these tales, at first a bewildered young woman navigating the terrain of new jobs and borrowed apartments in a long-vanished New York City. By the end, whether describing a newlywed journey to Italy, a child's life-threatening illness, Mary McCarthy's file cabinet, or the inner life of the "New Yorker" staff, this history of the heart shows us how persistent the past is in returning to us with entirely new lessons.

What do a whatchful fly and a weight-bearing whale have in common?

A grateful saint -- a saint whose life of work and devotion to God wouldn't have been the same without the loyalty. the friendship of a lion or a blackbird, an eagle or a deer.

Other saints in these stories -- two of the liveliest are women -- deal cleverly with animals who act up: snakes in one instance, greedy geese in another.

But in each of these stories, the commonality of all living things is luminously celebrated. The ten saints, whose biographies are given in the last pages, are named on the back of this jacket.