Thirteen stories deal with three sisters, a young woman's dashed hopes, failed love, life's dissatisfactions, missed opportunities, and the search for identity.

She was indeed a Queen. Born a peasant in thirteenth-century Burma, Queen Saw––young, beautiful, and extremely intelligent––reigned beside two kings. Everything luxuriantly cruel or voluptuously lovely swirled around the royal White Umbrella: mandarins, oracle-eating tigers, murdersome intrigue, egg-sized emeralds, concubines, fearsome magic, Tartars, and groveling courtiers (with elbows calloused as thickly as the soles of their feet). Queen Saw happily survived all––her two husbands as well as the Mongol invasion. Wonderful in its details and historical lore, the chief...

Aller Retour New Yorkis truly vintage Henry Miller, written during his most creative period, betweenTropic of Cancer(1934) andTropic of Capricorn(1939). Miller always said that his best writing was in his letters, and this unbuttoned missive to his friend Alfred Perles is not only his longest (nearly 80 pages ) but his best an exuberant, rambling, episodic, humorous account of his visit to New York in 1935 and return to Europe aboard a Dutch ship. Despite its high repute among Miller devotees, Aller Retour New Yorkhas never been easy to find. It was first brought out in Paris in 1935 in a...