This remarkable volume of stories from the author of Hostage to Fortune has been produced over a lifetime of writing. Tales Before Midnight explores a wide range of human emotion and events, from a city terrorized by a wild beast to the amusing spectacle of a gang of tree climbers just trying to stay out of trouble. There's the wealthy merchant and his teen-age bride, the Malagasy totocaf in Beethoven's Vienna and the mysterious stowaway who witnesses the guilty deeds of his fellow voyagers - or does he? A young and imaginative writer gets an early lesson in prejudice and censorship. A columnist tries to blackmail a crusading senator, a doctor once convicted of euthanasia is asked years later to commit the same act again, and a forgotten French town is liberated by a deserter and experiences close calls in a satirical retrospective of Cold War Europe. Tales Before Midnight rewrites the old adage that "truth is stranger than fiction." Certainly in these stories, fiction is often truer than truth.