Properly told, stories are able to operate on two levels. On the surface, they deal with involving a range of facts related to a given time and place, a local culture and a social group--and it is these specifics that tend to bore us whenever they lie outside of our own experience. But then, a layer beneath the particulars, the are hidden: the psychological, social and political themes that transcend the stories' temporal and geographical settings and are founded on unvarying fundamentals of human nature.