•  “Perfection” is one of the short stories collected in Helprin’s The Pacific and Other Stories (2004). The other stories focus on honorable characters who, in the interests of honing their lives in the direction of perfection, perform extraordinarily unselfish acts.

•  Helprin’s acclaimed novel A Soldier of the Great War (2005) tells the story of a young Italian man from a privileged family who finds the direction of his life changed forever by World War I. Along the way, he loses and rediscovers love and has to find a way of reconciling his love of beauty and religious faith with the horror of war.

•  The Collected Stories of Isaac Bashevis Singer (1983) provides an exuberant exploration of Jewish life, traditions, religion, and folklore from modern New York City to...