River gods and nymphs frolic in Ovid''s mythic telling. The trickster Coyote reroutes a river in a Native American tale. A set of stone steps at the shore of the Ganges bears witness to heartbreak in Rabindranath Tagore''s -River Stairs,- and Mark Twain floats his rebellious heroes on a raft to freedom. Kenneth Grahame''s Rat and Mole explore their local waterway in a rowboat, and Ernest Hemingway''s war-weary veteran finds peace while catching trout.
From The Wind in the Willows to Huckleberry Finn, from Hemingway''s -Big Two-Hearted River- to Alice Munro''s -The Found Boat- and Zadie Smith''s -The Lazy River,- the tales collected here-by such luminaries as Harriet Beecher Stowe, Guy de Maupassant, E.M. Forster, Hermann Hesse, Zora Neale Hurston, Cormac McCarthy, Elif Shafak, and many more-set moving scenes against the backdrop of moving waters, in testament to the enduring power of rivers in the human imagination.
