"Ulysses" is the most important book in my life. "Winter's Tale" is my favorite. If "Ulysses" is like that boyfriend/girlfriend with whom you're Totaly Fucking In Love, and with whom you constantly fight, and break up, and get back together, and cheat on or get cheated on by, and break up with again, and get back together with again, and sit in your car outside their house listening to Fall Out Boy and crying and about whom you talk incessantly to your friends about what an Impossible Heartless Pointless Slutty Asshole they are and then light up like a schoolchild on Christmas morning when you get a text message from them, then "Winter's Tale" is like the best friend who you kind of secretly want to marry one day.

"Winter's Tale" is an 800 [give or take] page metaphysical fairy tale about a fictionalized New York City. Its extremely historical and should appeal anyone who, like me, is a geek for anything about the history of Manhattan--particularly in the sections set amongst the gang wars in the five points neighborhood in the mid nineteenth century--and yet, at the same time, the universe in which the book dwells is just slightly removed from ours, a magic realist retelling of the history of New York [and, by extension, America]. It follows an extraordinarily skilled grand larcenist named Peter Lake, who may or may not in fact be immortal, and through his experience, and the experience of an ever-widening web of those associated to him by degrees, builds a mythology of and for the city in which it is set.
The prose is dense and luxurious, as is the semi-dickensian plotline (There are at least 15 characters who could each support an entire book of their own. I guarantee you will fall in love with SOMEONE depicted in this novel). Unlike many modern authors, who seem to be operating on the assumption that the fewer words you use, the cooler you'll be, Helrpin writes phrases, sentences, and paragraphs like gourmet meals. There are moments in this book so good that they make the reader forget to breathe. It is one of the best literary adventures I've yet had.

Also, I used to own 5 copies of this book, and I currently known none. If you have my copy of "Winter's Tale," please return it, won't you?