“These stories, told with irony and evocative power, grounded in place, implicate themes of inquirers and voyeurs, the conjunctions and disjunctions of species, the dispossession of age, and the beauties and distortions of imagination.

In “The Figure in the Glass,” a photographic image of a man steps out of an entomology book, upending a musicologist’s career, when it hides in another book alongside a picture of a rare and beautiful Renaissance string instrument. In “Deceit of Snow,” a young couple on honeymoon in the Alps is lured to dangerous and implacable heights. In “The Bulbul Bird,” a patrician New England gentlemen loses his prized possession through the seemingly unrelated actions of his boarders.

In “Ponte Vecchio,” an old man, confused and alone, is adrift and lost in the storied streets of an ancient city. Amid undertones of growing anti-Semitism, a Depression-era family, in “One Summer in Maine” traveling Route One to Maine, spend a summer tinged alternately with magic and menace. In “The Damsel Fly” a man’s love for a damsel fly counterpoints with memories of his recently deceased wife, the hostility of his step-daughter, and his eventual discovery of the painful circumstances around his wife’s first marriage and his step-daughter’s birth.

Barbara Kremen grew up in New Jersey, graduated from Bryn Mawr College, and later pursued graduate studies in English and French literature at Harvard University, the University of North Carolina and the Sorbonne in Paris. She has worked variously as a journalist, a teacher, a researcher and writer at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. She lives in Durham, North Carolina, married for many years to Irwin Kremen, artist and psychology professor, now deceased.

During several years living abroad, in France and then in Switzerland, she devoted herself particularly to poetry; back in this country she began to write stories growing out of those experiences. In Durham, living with her husband and children, she developed an interest in the natural world and those scientists and naturalists exploring it in field and laboratory. Much of her fiction, with its strangely disorienting changes of perspective, is characterized by an exacting, yet imaginative, inquiry into the nature of reality through human lives and relationships in interaction with plants, animals, and insects. Implicit throughout many of her stories are themes of friendship and betrayal, the mystery of identity, the permutations of time, perceptions, and misconceptions.” - Horse and Buggy Press

Horse and Buggy Press, 2022

7” x 10”x 0.75”, hardcover with dustjacket

270 pages