Elle and Oz, strangers ready to restart their lives, meet by chance and flirtatiously swap stories in a dark abandoned house. They soon sense that these stories are coming from an unknown source. It's as if they are watching the stories rather than telling them. Then they become actors inside the stories, seeing and hearing as if they were the characters, affecting outcomes but still conscious of their separate contemporary selves in the dark abandoned house, their attraction heightened by this mysterious adventure. The stories transform: the two become characters from the Odyssey and Genesis, facing challenges in previous lives, challenges that they meet head-on . Finally, and they find themselves in a future where whole populations have transferred themselves to (or been absorbed into) a massive computer network. The human cycle of birth, death, and rebirth will end. They will live in that network forever. But Elle and Oz have a choice.

These stories, selected from three novels, show events of the Trojan War reflected through the minds of participants who are immersed in the immediacy of the moment. Because we're blessed with the gift of not knowing the future, life isn't just what happens. It's enriched by the cloud of possibilities, what might happen, what we expect and hope for. This novel is a showing rather than a telling of the stories of Troy, restoring the immediacy of the moment as experienced by Cassandra, Helen, Clytemnestra, Iphigenia, Polyxena, Andromache, and Hecuba. Your familiarity with the traditional stories will prompt you to anticipate, only to be surprised by depths of personality and motivation, consistent with the original, but unexpected. And you'll savor the ironic differences between what you know as a reader and what the characters know. Rather than tediously proceed from one event to the next, you leap ahead from one dramatic moment to the next. The action takes place in dialogue and inner dialogue (thoughts in the making) rather than narration/exposition. A standard synopsis/plot summary would miss the point of the book. The story unfolds as traditionally known, but the personalities and motivations of the main characters are often surprising. For example: Helen and Paris don't go to Troy and no one knows where they are until after the war has gone on for more than nine years. When she shows up, she had close-cropped hair and a jagged scar across her cheek (from an encounter with pirates. Achilles is a cross-dresser. He has a romance with Polyxena, daughter of the king of Troy, who has the look and the training of an Amazon and can out-wrestle her. Clytemnestra's handmaid is her lover Aegisthus in disguise. Her children are his, not her husband Agamemnon's.

24 stories plus self-contained excerpts from 9 novels, ranging from romance to mind-twisting fantasy to realism, to history. In addition to the title stories, these include: The Princess Tango, The Seventh Note, Reinventing the Airplane, The Gentle Inquisitor, Aunt Rachel and the Wizard of Oz, Saint Smith, The Place Where Time Stopped, Give Me Now My Nevermind, The Abandoned House on Rogers Avenue, Ethiopia Through Sonya's Eyes, Even Elephants Pray.

Raised in the Ukraine, Alexander Bulatovich (1870-1919) was a tsarist cavalry officer, an African explorer, and a religious leader. He guided an Ethiopian army through territory unknown even to them and fought in Manchuria during the Boxer Rebellion. When he retired at age 33 to join a monastery, seven of his men followed him there. Later, he led a religious movement at Mount Athos, fought in WWI, and, in the aftermath of the Russian Revolution, was shot dead on his doorstep in the Ukraine. The odd shifts in his career, his qualities as a leader, and the puzzle of what motivated him first drew me to him. I was also drawn by the strangeness of the events — Russian exploration in Ethiopia, the Russian conquest of Manchuria, and a heresy battle in the twentieth century for which hundreds of monks were sent into exile. My historical sources included books by Bulatovich himself and over 25 hours of interviews with his sister, Princess Mary Orbeliani, when she was 99. The Name of Hero covers his life up through Manchuria. I will continue his story in two subsequent novels — The Name of Man and The Name of God.

Because we're blessed with the gift of not knowing the future, life isn't just what happens. It's enriched by the cloud of possibilities, what might happen, what we expect and hope for. This novel is a showing rather than a telling of the stories of Troy, restoring the immediacy of the moment as experienced by Cassandra, Helen, Clytemnestra, Iphigenia, Polyxena, Andromache, Leda, and Hecuba. Your familiarity with the traditional stories will prompt you to anticipate, only to be surprised by depths of personality and motivation, consistent with the original, but unexpected. And you'll savor the ironic differences between what you know as a reader and what the characters know. Rather than tediously proceed from one event to the next, you leap ahead from one dramatic moment to the next. The action takes place in dialogue and inner dialogue (thoughts in the making) rather than narration/exposition.

The author's memoirs of her conversion and experiences as a traveling preacher in the United States, England and Ireland. Includes an account of her encounter with the Mormons in Kirtland, Ohio, a history of Mormonism, and her conclusion that it "was one of the most deep-concerted-plots of Hell, to deceive the hearts of the simple."--Page 150-157.