At one point, Harry Mark Petrakis thought The Shepherds of Shadows would be his last book, but he couldn't stop writing and now Cavafy's Stone and Other Village Tales is due out in November from Wicker Park Press.

"Obeying the dictum of John Steinbeck, who said a book is written, 'a page at a time, a day at a time,' in the fall of last year I started a series of short pieces, a sort of Spoon River of a Greek Village," Petrakis wrote.

"About six weeks ago, with 15 stories written totaling 65,000 words, I realized I had completed another book."

The story that inspired the new collection is "The Vision," a tale of an aging parish priest and his reaction after seeing a young woman bathing nude near a secluded mountain stream, among the "hidden ravines on the mountain where the earth hung strangely motionless, not a sight or a sound suggesting anything human existed there. The villagers believed those ravines were the domain of goat-hoofed satyrs and bewitching nymphs who emerged from their caves to frolic and couple in the moonlight, their music and laughter tempting and seducing to any poor soul who chanced by."

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