This collection of twelve short stories engages with two major research questions, one at the level of form and one at the level of content. At the level of form, experimental issues of architectonic and temporal span are tested in prose narratives each of which have different time-lengths. This playing with duration indirectly challenges the ease with which we conventionally distinguish the short-story from the novel ' still, of course, the dominant literary form in our culture. Poetic interpolations simultaneously challenge another genre distinction: namely, that between prose and poetry. At the level of content, the stories have a historical and geographical range (Renaissance Italy and modern Israel) that begs questions about place and time and, indeed, the relationship of the epic to the local. Though charged, perhaps inevitably, with human agency, the stories do glance toward postmodern questionings of the putative realism of character. RAE_import_type : Authored book RAE_uoa_type : English Language and Literature