In these thirteen tales, Fred Chappell offers an assortment of truth seekers: the botanist Linnaeus, the composer Offenbach, the poet Hart Crane and the visionary horror writer H.P. Lovecraft, along with fictional characters including a southern sheriff, a dealer in rare books, a country singer, and old maid and her suitor, and a mathematician. Altered history or future legend, disquieting, comic, or tall in the telling, each story is a created world where truth reveals itself in many shapes - and where Fred Chappell's special brand of magic transforms the commonplace.