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A superb collection of fifteen stories by an American master, E. L. Doctorow�the author of Ragtime, The March, The Book of Daniel, and Billy Bathgate He has been called �a national treasure� by George Saunders. Doctorow�s great topic, said Don DeLillo, is �the reach of American possibility, in which plain lives take on the cadences of history.� This power is apparent everywhere in these stories: the bravery and self-delusion of people seeking the American dream; the geniuses, mystics, and charlatans who offer people false hope, or an actual glimpse of greatness. In �A House on the Plains,� a mother has a plan for financial independence, which may include murder. In �Walter John Harmon,� a man starts a cult using subterfuge and seduction. �Jolene: A Life� follows a teenager who escapes her home for Hollywood on a perilous quest for success. �Heist,� the account of an Episcopal priest coping with a crisis of faith, was expanded into the bestseller City of God. �The Water Works,� about the underbelly of 1870s New York, grew into a brilliant novel. �Liner Notes: The Songs of Billy Bathgate� is a corollary to the renowned novel and includes Doctorow�s revisions. These fifteen stories, written from the 1960s to the early twenty-first century, and selected, revised, and placed in order by the author himself shortly before he died in 2015, are a testament to the genius of E. L. Doctorow. Praise for E. L. Doctorow �He has rewarded us, these forty-five years, with a vision of ourselves, as a people, a vision possessed of what I might call �aspirational verve��he sees us clearly and tenderly, just as we are, but also sees past that�to what we might, at our best, become.��George Saunders �Doctorow did not so much write fiction about history as he seemed to occupy history itself. He owned it. He made it his own.��Ta-Nehisi Coates �On every level, [Doctorow�s] work is powerful. . . . His sensitivity to language is perfectly balanced, and complemented by a gigantic vision.��Jennifer Egan �[Doctorow wrote] with such stunning audacity that I can still remember my parents� awed dinner-table conversation, that summer, about a novel they were reading, called Ragtime, that went up to the overgrown wall enclosing the garden of fiction and opened the doorway to history.��Michael Chabon �Doctorow�s prose tends to create its own landscape, and to become a force that works in opposition to the power of social reality.��Don DeLillo �A writer of dazzling gifts and boundless imaginative energy.��Joyce Carol Oates