Mosses from an Old Manse is Nathaniel Hawthorne at his most intimate and haunted. Written during his brief residence in the legendary Concord parsonage where Emerson once lived, this collection weaves together essays and short stories into something less like a book and more like a prolonged act of excavation. Hawthorne wanders through the rooms and grounds of the Old Manse, peeling back layers of history, and finds there not peace but ghosts: the weight of Puritan sermons, the shadow of the Revolutionary War fought nearby, and his own anxieties about whether he can deserve such a place. The stories that follow are uniformly strange and beautiful, exploring the collision between scientific ambition and moral consequence ('The Birth-Mark'), the costs of artistic purity ('The Artist of the Beautiful'), and the terrifying slipperiness of faith ('Young Goodman Brown'). This is Hawthorne in his laboratory, testing the boundaries between the rational and the uncanny, between what we see and what we imagine. For readers who want American literature that rewards slow, careful attention, these mosses have been growing for nearly two centuries and they still retain their strange moisture.
