“I believe this book contains a few kernels which may grow into trees,” Rainer Maria Rilke revealed in a letter to a friend in 1900, shortly after the Stories of God were first published. The young poet had conceived them in only seven consecutive nights. They tell of the hands of God, of singers in the expanses of Russia, of a thimble that came to be God – in short, they tell of a world in which faith is alive and God is immediately present.