Twice-told tales

About the book

The stories and sketches in Twice-Told Tales move between colonial New England, imagined experiments, ordinary observations, and lives shaped by concealed motives. A minister's unexplained veil, an absent husband who remains strangely near his former home, and an experiment with renewed youth become ways of examining how people interpret one another and themselves. Historical pieces give communal memory a similarly uncertain character, mixing inherited ideals with violence, intolerance, or loss. Hawthorne's measured narrative voice often offers a moral possibility without exhausting the mystery that produced it. This collection includes both well known tales and quieter reflective sketches, allowing its allegorical inventions to sit beside the attentive observation of streets, weather, objects, and passing human scenes.

• Secrecy and interpretation
• Moral uncertainty
• New England memory

Why read it

Read it for stories whose apparently clear symbols keep opening into further questions about human conduct.

English text