A pretty little hardcover that is light and fits well in the hand with a built-in ribbon bookmark - it's made to read. It brings me back to childhood when my mom would come home with a stack of books for me from the library - not really based on author or topic, just stuff my mom figured I'd like. I would read them all and many were meh, but oh, when one of them was really good in an unexpected way, like nothing I'd ever read before, what a windfall! Multi-author compilations like River Stories are something I'd encounter often, and the better ones reproduced the joy of serendipitous discovery of mom's library pile within the they covers of a single book. The selections in this book are wonderful and various - I'd only read a couple them and loved the vast majority of them.