River Stories

by Dr Henry Hughes (Editor)

352 pages, Hardcover

Published June 5, 2025

Reviews

[Brianna Cornell · Rating 4 out of 5]

I have so much love for this topic and concept—reading stories about rivers from diverse authors and time periods was such a peaceful and fulfilling experience. Everyone has some sort of a relationship with a river. These authors explore those relationships in ways that are meaningful, honest, and at times magical.

The stories that rose to the top of this collection for me were “Big Two Hearted River,” “What is a Volcano?,” and the Herman Hesse excerpt but it’s so hard to limit the list to just those ones because there are so many wonderful snippets of literature in here. I have found Everyman’s pocket classics such as this one to be an excellent source for discovering new authors as well as a fascinating deep dive into topics that are central to human life.

[John Hoole · Rating 5 out of 5]

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.