- A journalist's interview with an artist turns into a dizzying roundelay of memory and image.
- Two Russian brothers, one blind and one deaf, build an intricate model town during an interminable train ride across the steppe.
- An annotated discography for the works of a long-lost silent film star turns into a mysterious document of obsession.
- Three Russian sailors must find ways to pass the time on a freighter orphaned in a foreign port.
- A forgotten composer enters a nostalgic dream-world while marking time in a decaying Romanian seaport.
In these 19 dreamlike tales, ghosts of the past mingle with the quiddities of modernity in a bewitching stew where lost masterpieces surface with translations in an invisible language, where image and photograph become mystically entwined, and where the very nature of reality takes on a shimmering sense of possibility and illusion. "Every madness is logical to its owner," one of Rose's characters says. And it is that line -- between logic and madness -- that Walter Benjamin Stares at the Sea walks with such assuredness and imagination.