chronicles the remarkable life of Boston-born, New York City-reared author Richard Bowes. Bowes's childhood and adolescent brushes with dramatic spirits and hustlers, large and small, paved the way for his adult encounters with the remarkable, the numinous, the supernatural. Deftly orchestrated, this "memoir" is part impassioned homage to Manhattan--decades before and up to its recent wound on September 11th, which creates a hole in the city and allows the ghosts of the dead to return--and part tell-all of the uncanny secrets behind a group of Greenwich Village writers and life as a university librarian.