Night Train and Other Stories is a collection of thirteen short stories told by an anthropologist narrator and set in locales around the world. Among the characters and events appearing in the stories are a ship that mysteriously disappears in the South Pacific, a renowned anthropologist who finds her Shangri La in the New Guinea highlands, a middle-aged American couple who briefly discover enlightenment in India, a freighter ship that loses an unpopular passenger in the mid-Pacific, a quartet of passengers traveling by overnight train from Prague to Berlin, a Polynesian man from the South Pacific and his flirtation with America, an out-of-body experience on the Solo River in Java and a San Francisco New Year's Eve party with an assortment of strangely quiet guests. The stories cover a time span of approximately sixty years and some of them incorporate historical events such as the Battle of the Bulge, the fall of the Berlin Wall, the bombing of Pearl Harbor and the Holocaust.