"Ellis Island," the longest and best [story in Mark Helprin's collection by the same title,] drops its protagonist into a goldeneh medina whose disquieting fairy-tale landscapes call to mind Walt Disney, as well as Edgar Allan Poe and the brothers Grimm….

The sustenance derived from remembered love is a theme that threads through several Helprin stories—"The Schreuderspitze," in which a man whose wife and son have been killed purges his grief by preparing to climb an Alp, and "Palais de Justice," in which a courtly old lawyer, rowing on the Charles River, calls on his memories of his wife for the strength to defeat a "barbaric" young racer. A like desire to outdistance the forces of barbarism fires a sea captain, who rescues an ape from a typhoon and immediately regrets it…. Perched in the rigging, the ape soon becomes a problem of morals rather than sanitation...