A desperate woman conceals a devastating secret from her fianc . A battered boy's unthinkable wish entraps him in a haunted reality. An exacting film critic finds non-celluloid love difficult to dismiss. An astronomer surveys the toll on his marriage as an insidious cult of personality takes hold all around him. Set in isolated monasteries, in the cabs of snowplows, in maximum-security prisons and junior-high locker rooms and windowless Manhattan apartments, the bracing, innovative stories in Daniel Scott's The Great Silence expose and exalt human longing amidst the push and promise of American life.