The Feast of the Widow and Other Stories is a collection of several short stories, a personal essay, and the title novella. The work included here tracks my exploration of how to invoke in my fiction all the complex forces--existential, supernatural, historical, mythical, emotional--that act on the human world and influence the human experience Of the short stories included here, half--"Selling the Couch," "Grace," and "Elegy"--Fall into the realm of traditional realist fiction, while "Kings" and "Cave Dwelling" incorporate elements of fairy tales, legend, and/or fantasy into a traditional realist, semi-autobiographical framework, and "The Cooking Grate" re-imagines the Hansel & Gretel tale. The personal essay, "We follow the railroad" explores my Italian-American family's roots and my own rootlessness through a series of interwoven vignettes The novella is narrated by two alternating point of view characters, Gaetano and Catarina, and set in the small fictional Italian village of Santa Lucia in the middle of the 20 th century The novella follows three main dramatic arcs--the young midwife Catarina's mysterious ability to invoke the dead; Gaetano's 30-year infatuation with Catarina's mother, Antonella; and the "widow" Geneveva who has, with the help of Santa Lucia's womenfolk, established a yearly ritual to honor the memory of her murdered fiance, Fabrizio The desperate acts to which Geneveva is driven by her incessant grief connect and propel the events that unfold throughout the course of the novella.