The forty-seven stories in this collection, selected by Singer himself out of nearly one hundred and fifty, range from the publication of his now-classic first collection, "Gimpel the Fool," in 1957, until 1981. They include supernatural tales, slices of life from Warsaw and the shtetls of Eastern Europe, and stories of the Jews displaced from that world to the New World, from the East Side of New York to California and Miami.

Isaac Bashevis Singer (1904-91) was the author of many novels, stories, children's books, and memoirs. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1978.