In ANTIQUITIES, Lloyd Wilkinson Petrie, one of the seven elderly trustees of the now-defunct (for 34 years) Temple Academy for Boys, is preparing a memoir of his days at the school, intertwined with the troubling distractions of present events. As he navigates, with faltering recall, between the subtle anti-Semitism that pervaded the school's ethos and his fascination with his own family's heritage, he reconstructs the passions of a childhood encounter with the oddly named Ben-Zion Elefantin, a mystifying older pupil who claims descent from Egypt's Elephantine Island. Included alongside this wondrous tale are four additional stories weaving myth and mania, history and illusion: "The Coast of New Zealand," "The Bloodline of the Alkanas," "Sin" and "A Hebrew Sibyl."

FOREIGN BODIES retells the story of Henry James’s classic THE AMBASSADORS but as a photographic negative --- that is, the plot is the same, but the meaning entirely reversed.