Twice-Told Tales

Hawthorne's famous collection of tales - published originally in magazines and newspapers and then in two separate editions during Hawthorne's lifetime - includes many of his best stories, from "The Minister's Black Veil" and "Wakefield" to "Mr. Higginbotham's Catastrophe" and "The Lily's Quest." Animated, as Rosemary Mahoney writes in the Introduction, by "the struggle between chaos and order, animal impulse and the specter of eternal damnation, purity of action against the power of temptation and the fear of isolation," these stories - like all of Hawthorne's work - remain powerfully contemporary.