Poignant, humorous, and probing by turns, and set in the legendary Tarascan country of Michoacan in the 1960s, these eleven tales of Mexican villagers and wandering young Americans bring into sharp focus a rural Latin American world that has all but vanished with the enormous changes of the last few decades. In "A Cathedral Half in Gray," the ghost of a church and its new residents create an eerie home that never should have been. Millers and goblins follow the spectral white tracks of a burro train into a remote river valley in "The Red Kite." A humble tire repairman and his wife want children too much, with disastrous consequences, in "The Flat." The bloody Mexican Revolution casts its long shadow over a New Mexican grandmother and her doting granddaughter in the delightfully named "Dancing Is to Walking as Singing Is to Talking." "Middle Class" asks the pointed question: What do people think they are, and how do they go about making themselves what they need to be? Of Lou Becton, a boat-loving central fixture of these stories, Dona Eulalia says, "We can all see it clearly. How else would he do it? Senor Becton is middle-class.