Love of the Blossoming Hills: New England Stories and Sketches

Featuring colorful, exquisitely sculpted stories of many kinds-ranging from the comic to the tragic, the satirical to the serious, the lyrical to the macabre, and even the philosophical to the zany-Love of the Blossoming Hills presents a fascinating cavalcade of characters and incidents steeped in the regional tradition and history of northern New England. Here we find, among many others, tales of a wildly eccentric family whose interminable feuding over generations is tempered annually only by a glorious Christmas pie, a brilliant lawyer whose early and inexplicable death is shrouded in the darkest mystery, a Russian ballet master who sets up an international ballet school in an isolated farmhouse in the White Mountains, a devoted Latin teacher who enthralls her students with the claim that she is a reincarnation of a girl who perished in the great volcanic catastrophe of Pompei, and a young schoolgirl whose visit to the sinister domicile of a once renowned "poetess" turns initially into a nightmare and finally into a personal triumph. These stories, above all, are an expression of a love of life set off against the ever astonishing natural and social landscape of northern New England.