Pages From The Textbook Of Alternate History - Softcover

Nguyen, Phong

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1732009198 ISBN 13: 9781732009196

Publisher: Mastodon Publishing, 2019

Synopsis

Fiction. At critical moments in world history, every political, spiritual, and cultural leader foresaw a different destiny. Columbus planned a Western sea route to Asia; Hitler applied to art school twice; Joan of Arc prophesied that she would become a mother. It is out of their failures that history itself is made. But what if the history-makers succeeded in the fulfillment of their best-laid plans? In PAGES FROM THE TEXTBOOK OF ALTERNATE HISTORY, Phong Nguyen explores a myriad of pasts in which these icons of history made a different choice, and got what they wished for.

About this title

About the Author

Phong Nguyen's most recent book of short-stories is PAGES FROM THE TEXTBOOK OF ALTERNATE HISTORY (Mastodon Publishing, 2019). He is the author of the novel The Adventures of Joe Harper (Outpost19, 2016), winner of the Prairie Heritage Book Award), and the short-story collection MEMORY SICKNESS AND OTHER STORIES (Elixir Press, 2011), winner of the Elixir Press Fiction Award. He coedited the volume NANCY HALE: ON THE LIFE & WORK OF A LOST AMERICAN MASTER (Pleiades Press, 2012) with Dan Chaon and Norah Lind. Individual stories by Nguyen have appeared in more than 50 national literary journals in print and online, including Agni, Boulevard, Iowa Review, Massachusetts Review, North American Review, New Letters, River Styx, and Kenyon Review Online. He is the Miller Family Endowed Chair in Literature and Writing at the University of Missouri in Columbia, where he lives with his wife—the artist Sarah Nguyen—and their three children.

Review

“Phong Nguyen’s Pages from the Textbook of Alternate History is an astonishing and audacious book—alternately poetic and spooky, heartbreaking and hilarious, a profound examination of the way the past has shaped us.”
—Dan Chaon, author of Ill Will

“In Pages from the Textbook of Alternate History, Phong Nguyen explores fiction’s greatest question—’What if?’—in stories that are generous, incisive, daring, and endlessly inventive. By altering our history, Nguyen brilliantly reveals our present.”
—Michael Kardos, author of Bluff

“Like Borges’ A Universal History of Infamy, Nguyen’s Pages from the Textbook of Alternate History explores the frailty of the past, and the pasts that might have been: Siddhartha, failing to conquer attachment, settles for no more than conquering the world; and Hitler dies as a young soldier in WWI, killed in the moment his aesthetic threatens to transcend kitsch. Avert the futures in which you haven’t read this.”
—Zachary Mason, author of Metamorphica

“Pages from the Textbook of Alternate History is strange and smart. You will read it thinking that you know the stories, and you do, just never before quite like this. What if Jesus was never crucifi ed? What if the bomb was never dropped on Hirohshima? What if there was no America? Nguyen’s Alternate History stories expose history itself as nothing more than a collection of well-told stories.”
—Tiphanie Yanique, author of Land of Love and Drowning

Edition details

• Publisher: Mastodon Publishing
• Publication date: 2019
• ISBN 10: 1732009198
• ISBN 13: 9781732009196
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 158