Brilliant, lovely stories; go out and get this book at once.

Still here? OK.

"Winter's Tale" was my first Mark Helprin book. I thought it was the perfect novel, glorious and mysterious, realistic and magical, funny and strange and wondrous and sad. If anything, it was too much of a good thing; like spending all day at the carnival.

The stories in "Ellis Island and other stories" are the same entrancing medicine, but in smaller doses. Don't let the big "Ellis Island" on the cover, and the grainy black-and-white picture of a ship approaching the Statue of Liberty, scare you off; this is not mundane history, or even historical fiction. The stories are not all about immigrants, or Europe, or the War, although those threads do run through some of them.

The title story is the longest, placed last in the book, and it is about the Ellis Island, and the Immigration, but it's a fantastic (and beautifully true, of course) version of those historical markers, complete with a wonderful machine that melts the snow from the streets supported only by its own jets of fire, the Saromsker Rabbi and his memorable sermon on the bees, lovely Hava, and Elise whose hair is a pillar of fire. Of the eleven stories, it's the closest to "Winter's Tale" in spirit (although "A Vermont Tale" is closest in the perfect flavor of deep Northeastern winter). And as in "Winter's Tale", Helprin is not averse here to destroying beautiful things for the sake of a larger beauty, even if (to this soft-hearted reader at least) the logic of the narrative does not strictly demand it. But I'm not complaining; part of Helprin's gospel is that death is part of art.

I can do nothing like justice to the rest of the stories in the amount of time I can plausibly extract from you. Some vague ideas: in "The Schreuderspitze", a photographer deals with tragedy in the luminous Alps; in "Letters from the Samantha", strange events on an iron-hulled sailing ship in 1879 involve questions of humanity and guilt; in "Martin Bayer" a small boy is a small boy, on the eve of war; in "North Light" and "A Room of Frail Dancers" we see what entering, and leaving, battle does to soldiers. "La Volpaia" is wonderfully witty, and "Tamar" is simply lovely. These glib little descriptions have already done enough damage; I will restrain myself from sullying "White Gardens" and "Palais de Justice": you simply have to read them.

One of Helprin's strengths is how well he knows what he is doing. Here are words from the end of "Tamar", and they apply as well to these stories as they do to the beautiful seventeen-year-old of the title, a touching thin silver wire across her upper teeth:

"Perhaps things are most beautiful when they are not quite real; when you look upon a scene as an outsider, and come to possess it in its entirety and forever; when you live in the present with the lucidity and feeling of memory; when for want of connection, the world deepens and becomes art."

%A Mark Helprin
%B Ellis Island and other stories
%T The Schreuderspitze
%T Letters from the Samantha
%T Martin Bayer
%T North Light
%T A Vermont Tale
%T White Gardens
%T Palais de Justice
%T A Room of Frail Dancers
%T La Volpaia
%T Tamar
%T Ellis Island
%I Harcourt Brace & Company / A Harvest Book
%C San Diego
%D 1991
%G ISBN 0-15-628315-8
%P 196 pp.
%O trade paperback, US$10.00