Fennel and Rue
1908
Philip Verrian has finally made it. After years of rejection, his novel is running in a prestigious magazine and the literary world is noticing. Then comes a letter from a young woman who claims to be a dying invalid, begging him to tell her how the story ends before it's published. The request torments him: reveal the ending and betray his editor's trust, or withhold it and refuse a dying reader her only wish. What follows is a quietly devastating exploration of what stories mean to those who love them, and whether authors bear any responsibility for the hearts their words move. Howells, the great chronicler of American middle-class life, here turns his gimlet eye on the strange intimacy between writer and reader, and asks whether fiction is merely entertainment or something closer to a sacred promise.
