Twelve stories about art and the people it ruins or saves: a Pittsburgh boy who steals to live one week in the style he dreams of, a sculptor's body brought back to the Kansas town that produced him, an old farm wife from Nebraska taken to a Wagner concert in Boston and undone by it, Norwegian settlers on the Divide, a Bohemian girl who comes home. Cather moved to Nebraska at nine and spent her career on the collision between that country and the thing she wanted; The Troll Garden, the core of this volume, was her first book of fiction. Fifty-eight plates of winter coast and mountain light by painters including Edvard Munch and George Bellows run alongside these stories of art and its cost.