High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! Prayers to Broken Stones is a short story anthology by the American author Dan Simmons. It includes 13 of his earlier works, along with an introduction by Harlan Ellison in which the latter relates how he "discovered" Dan Simmons at the Colorado Mountain College`s "Writers` Conference in the Rockies" in 1981. The title is a borrowed line from T. S. Eliot`s "The Hollow Men".