"One of the finest American writers alive . he is Melville + Poe + Borgesbut with a heart far more capacious."--Junot Díaz Praised for his "beautifully crafted and strangely surreal" (Peter Matthiessen) stories, Terrence Holt had been operating under the literary radar for more than fifteen years, placing award-winning stories in such noted journals as Zoetrope , Kenyon Review , and TriQuarterly . With the release of this debut collection, Holt's work takes its "rightful place besides those works of genius--fiction, philosophy, theology--unafraid of axing into our iced hearts" (William Giraldi, New York Times Book Review ). Whether chronicling a plague that ravages a New England town or the anguish of a son who keeps his father's beating heart in a jar, Holt's stories oscillate between the rational and the surreal, the future and the past, masterfully weaving together reality and myth. Like Poe or Hawthorne, "Holt is a gifted wordsmith, his sentences carefully shaped and often beautiful, and he spins these ancient, irresolvable dilemmas in an elegiac poetry" ( Los Angeles Times ).