A number of these stories and essays are reprinted from literary journals, and one essay first appeared in The New York Times Magazine, but most are published here for the first time. The most recent stories range from a California prison to a house in foreclosure outside Trenton, New Jersey, to a high-powered Philadelphia law firm, but though the settings vary, they display thematic unity -- the power and propinquity of the unknown. "From the Depths" is a cycle of seventeen stories about people on the bottom of the social ladder in the early twenty-first century, while the 1980s series, "Kindness in the City, Six Stories," evokes the magic of the metropolis, that is, Manhattan. The essays deal with four Renaissance literary masterpieces of humanism, by Cervantes, Rabelais, Erasmus and Boccaccio, the work of a contemporary fiction writer, Ozick, and an analysis of Augustine's Confessions. Altogether these stories and essays make for an extremely various and compelling mix.About the Author: Eve Ottenberg has published seventeen novels and this collection of stories. Her short fiction has appeared in a number of literary journals. She has also published much journalism and criticism over the years: she has written a weekly column for The Village Voice on politics and housing in Manhattan and also covered the criminal courts for the Voice. Her book reviews have appeared in The New York Times Book Review, Vanity Fair, The Baltimore Sun, The Philadelphia Inquirer, USA Today, The Cleveland Plain Dealer, The Nation, The New Yorker's "Briefly Noted" section, The Washington Post, The Washington City Paper, In These Times and many other venues. She has published articles in The New York Times Magazine, Vogue, Elle, Working Mother, Truthout and other magazines and newspapers. She has also worked as an editor and writer at several publications.