The Old World and Other Stories

These thirty-five brief stories -- and the found photographs that inspired them -- are by turns realistic and surreal, bloody and tender, delightful and appalling. Award-winning author Cary Fagan has created a mesmerizing series of narrative tales, giving readers a vivid peek into lives of strangers.

A man hangs onto a runaway horse. A woman paints in the nude. A shop window advertising a sale on blankets hides much more behind it. A lone tombstone on a hill speaks of a years-long feud. The stories -- capturing portraits, objects, moments in time -- while dizzyingly varied, form a single image that, in the words of the author, "belong to one history, found in an album that might belong to any of us."

Deftly marrying vision and language with memory and imagination, Fagan paints an intimate portrait of forgotten lives that is profound, generous, and highly entertaining.