By both literary ambition and literary reputation, Robert Stone, with five novels to his credit, has already established himself as one of the strongest and most impressive novelists of our time. He has taken readers from the underbelly of New Orleans to the jungles of Vietnam, from the brutality of war-torn Central America to the sinister glamour of Hollywood. It has been nearly five years since the publication of his best-selling novel Outerbridge Reach, a work distinguished for its integrity and vision. The stories collected in Bear and His Daughter span nearly thirty years. Written between 1969 and the present, they explore, as powerfully and acutely as his novels, our common troubled condition and the humanity that unites us. In "Miserere," Mary Urquhart is a widowed librarian whose unspeakable secret concerning the death of her husband and children causes her to undertake a most unusual and grisly role in the antiabortion crusade. In his classic and widely anthologized story "Hel Read Less