In Conversations with the Underground, stories, poems, plays, and even a short film serve as portals through which the disembodied return and put on their traveling shoes. A Bodhisattva appears at the Plainfield, VT Farmers' Market, a Jaguar driving priest rescues a hypothermic hitchhiker, and a drowned man and his dog return to change a woman's mind. Set in "all the old familiar places" ranging from hardscrabble Vermont; the night highways of New York State; a shrimp boat in Lafayette, Louisiana; a restaurant terrace in Madrid, Conversations with the Underground reminds us that, yes, novelist Tim O'Brien was right: "Stories can save us."