E. L. Doctorow

During the Great Depression a young man follows a private train to Loon Lake, the hidden wilderness estate of one of the country's richest men.

New York at the end of the 20th century--hardly St. Augustine's city of God--is the canvas on which Doctorow paints an impressionistic portrait of man's frail moral nature and the possibilities of redemption.

An assortment of short fiction ranges across America, from Alaska to the District of Columbia, as it explores the complexities of modern life in such stories as "Jolene: a Life," "A House on the Plains," "Baby Wilson," and "Walter John Harmon."

Daniel, a young man whose Communist parents were arrested by the FBI and executed on charges of treason, attempts, decades later, to make sense of their lives and deaths.

The lives and passions of a middle class, small town family are interwoven with the scandals and events of America in 1906.

A successful suburbanite commuter Howard Wakefield takes a perverse detour from family life: He vanishes without a trace. Hidden in the attic of his carriage house garage, surviving by scavenging at night, Howard secretly observes the lives of his wife and children and neighbors. Wakefield becomes a fraught meditation on marriage and identity, as Howard slowly realizes that he has not in fact left his family, he has left himself.