Ten ghostly tales of the Gilded Age from one of America's finest writers -- Edith Wharton (1862-1937), author of The Age of Innocence, winner of the 1920 Pulitzer Prize. "Wharton's graceful sentences create dramatic, populous tableaux and peel back layer after layer of artifice and pretense, of what we say and how we wish to appear, revealing the hidden kernel of what human beings are like, alone and together." FRANCINE PROSE "Despite all her privileges, despite her strenuous socializing, she remained an isolate and a misfit, which is to say, a born writer." JONATHAN FRANZEN "...Wharton has as much to say to us now as she did to readers in the first half of the [twentieth] century. She is indisputably one of our finest writers." SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE