Nathaniel Hawthorne

A rose pressed between the pages of a magic book has been dead for fifty-five years. When Dr. Heidegger drops it into a vase, it blooms again—and four old friends begin to wonder whether youth might return to them, too.

In the doctor’s cobwebbed study, beneath a watchful portrait and beside a closet that holds a skeleton, three ruined gentlemen and the long-secluded Widow Wycherly gather around a glass of strange water. Hawthorne’s tales turn such uncanny premises into searching encounters with human frailty: the hunger to undo the past, the temptation to trespass in the name of knowledge, and the consequences that follow. Dr. Heidegger offers his guests a second chance at youth, but can a lifetime’s regret teach them how to use it?

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