Böcker av Robert Wexelblatt

Other Places, Other Times is a collection of twenty-six historical fictions. Thirteen of the stories are about Chen Hsi-wei, an imaginary peasant/poet of the Sui period, circa 600 C.E.As a boy, Hsi-wei served the emperor on a perilous mission. He turned down the offer of material rewards in favor of an education which made him a poet. Hsi-wei travels the empire making straw sandals and verses. The narratives account for Hsi-wei's poems, which are also included. The other thirteen stories are set in various times and locations, from post-war England to Renaissance Italy, Paris in the Fifties to post-war Germany, South America in the sixteenth century to Hesse in the mid-nineteenth, Ruthenia in the seventeenth, and the American West after the Civil War.

Fiction. The fourteen stories in HEIBERG'S TWITCH were not selected for their resemblance to one another, but for their differences in character, tone, and form. The aim is to deploy imagination and invention to furnish tales about the variety of human conditions, the scope of thought, the diversity of experience. Settings range from a Scandinavian island to ancient Chinese courts, from the streets of Hyde Park in Boston to the galleries of midtown Manhattan, from Southern California to Eastern Europe, from Africa to South America--in one story, both continents at once. The stories are populated by schoolboys and poets, dictators and delinquents, college girls and composers, businessmen and scientists. Each tale conjures its own world, has its own language, aims to illuminate a distinct experience, a unique situation. Like human life, the stories in HEIBERG'S TWITCH are comic sad, pathetic, perplexing, and tragic.