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The stories here, all of them written between March of 1972 and November of 1973, mark a critical turning point in my career. Those who know the three earlier volumes have traced my evolution from a capable journeyman, very young and as much concerned with paying the rent as he was to advancing the state of the art, into a serious, dedicated craftsman now seeking to leave his mark on science fiction in some significant way. Throughout the decade of the 1960s I had attempted to grow and evolve within the field of writing I loved building on the best that went before me, the work of Theodore Sturgeon and James Blish and Cyril Kornbluth and Jack Vance and Philip K. Dick and half a dozen others whose great stories had been beacons beckoning me onward and then, as I reached my own maturity, now trying to bring science fiction along with me into a new realm of development, hauling it along even farther out of its pulp-magazine origins toward what I regarded as a more resonant and evocative kind of visionary storytelling.

Robert Silverberg, from his introduction

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. Grand Master Silverberg (Roma Eterna) is one of science fiction's finest short story writers, and this superb volume shows him at his best. In the masterful novella Born with the Dead, Jorge Klein cannot accept that his recently resurrected wife no longer loves him, preferring the company of other deads. Schwartz Between the Galaxies introduces a near-future anthropologist who lectures on the destruction of indigenous human cultures while daydreaming of interstellar travel. In The Dybbuk of Mazel Tov IV an alien approaches secular Jew Shimon, speaks to him in fluent Hebrew and claims to be possessed by the soul of Shimon's departed friend. Thought-provoking and deeply ironic, these stories and the others in this volume are as powerful today as they were when they first saw print. (June)
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