The Slantwise Histories and Other Stories

From the award-winning and New York Times bestselling author of The Everlasting and StarlingHouse comes a new collection of stories about tricksters and ghosts, ordinary magic and mundane spectacle. Alix E. Harrow spins tales never-told and seen just outside the periphery of reality–in the tradition of Angela Carter, Anne Sexton, and Carmen Maria Machado, these resonant and defiant stories leap from the page and dance in and out of a history that never was (but could have been) and into a future startingly like our own. What’s a legend, except a history told slantwise? These are stories about the past as it wasn’t quite, but might have been, from ancient battlefields all the way up through roadside attractions off I-70. They’re about the people caught in the mean jaws of history: the women and workers, the soldiers and mothers, everyone shoved into the margins of the world. But these aren’t stories about victims —they’re stories about the ones that got away. The ones who defected and dissented, who broke the rules, who ran and tossed a match behind them. THE SLANTWISE HISTORIES collects the best known short fiction of Alix. E. Harrow, including the Hugo-award winning "A Witch's Guide to Escape: A Practical Compendium of Portal Fantasies" and, for the first time in print, "The Six Deaths of the Saint" and "The Knight and the Butcherbird". Updated to reflect the author's preferred editions, Slantwise Histories also includes "The Long Way Up", "Roadside Attraction", "Mr. Death", "The Ransom of Miss Coraline Connelly", "The Sycamore and the Sybil", "Do Not Look Back, My Lion", "The Whisper in the Weld", "Dustbaby", and four all-new short stories.