"I was traveling across America, and then Europe, and then Russia, and then the Middle East," author Benjamin Wachs says of these 26 remarkable tales, "waking up each morning not knowing which city I would fall asleep in. Cities became pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, connecting in ways that you could not see on a map, to reveal the secret order of the universe."

While these fictional accounts had their visible beginnings in a freelance journalist's world travel, they had their inner beginnings in the fertile workings of a remarkable mind. My own sense of the author, watching him in my writing...