Tales of Men and Ghosts

Edith Wharton named this collection Tales of Men and Ghosts, but the specters here are not the draped figures of gothic tradition. They are the debts that accumulate in secret, the moral failures that return to haunt the polished surfaces of Gilded Age New York, and the terrible reckonings that await those who mistake wealth for virtue. In these ten stories, Wharton turns her exacting gaze upon American gentlemen and gentlewomen, subjecting them to tests that reveal the hollowness beneath their social elegance. A marriage built on a devastating lie. A philosopher whose theories crumble when applied to his own conduct. The terrible price of a betrayal buried for decades. Wharton, who understood better than almost any writer how society functions as both stage and prison, uses these tales to dissect the cruelty that polite people inflict behind closed doors. The supernatural appears in only two stories, but every tale carries the weight of something unspoken, something that will out. These are ghost stories in the truest sense: narratives about what we cannot escape.