Dinesen's stories are the work of a writer with a powerful imagination and a shrewd intelligence." -- The New York Times Book Review
In the classic "Babette's Feast," a mysterious Frenchwoman prepares a sumptuous feast for a gathering of religious ascetics and, in doing so, introduces them to the true essence of grace. In "The Immortal Story," a miserly old tea-trader living in Canton wishes for power and finds redemption as he turns an oft-told sailors' tale into reality for a young man and woman. And in the magnificent novella Ehrengard, Dinesen tells of the powerful yet restrained rapport between a noble Wagnerian beauty and a rakish artist.

Hauntingly evoked and sensuously realized, the five stories and novella collected here have the hold of "fairy stories read in childhood...of dreams...and of our life as dreams" (The New York Times).

"[Dinesen's] imagination could visit, it seemed, any corner of European history and find there a tale tinged with the luster and vivid shadowing of medieval allegory." -- John Updike