History Lessons

The stories in this award-winning collection all bear some relationship to history, personal or communal. Several are based on iconic American figures, from William Miller to Margaret Hamilton to Ray Charles. Others evince a feminist impulse to redeem from history those women whose lives would otherwise go unremarked, such as Juana la Loca and Bridget Cleary. Still others explore the ways in which language constructs and deconstructs character--Thomas Power James engaged in completing Charles Dickens's unfinished novel, The Mystery of Edwin Drood; Branwell Broente struggling to distinguish between personal history and his family's texts; and Gerard de Nerval warring against his incipient madness. All of the stories, whether realistic or experimental, witty or solemn, acknowledge how the past continually informs the present.