Elizabeth Alexander, of New Mexico, formerly of Seattle, has given us a collection of published and unpublished stories set variously in “reality” and in the narrator’s imagination, featuring intermittently recurring characters—most notably a sentient dashboard doll. They treat Jim Crow, World War II, the Algerian War, and the “war on terror” while exploring social and personal loss.  The cover features an original image by Cooper Renner.

In an interview in Uncanny Valley, the title story is described thus: “On Anzio Beach” is made of characters and events that at first seem whimsical, but then reveal themselves as complex and somber, or even melancholy—as an example, Alet is a talking terrier, but he’s also the reincarnation of the narrator’s father’s friend, returned in this dog body for only a short time.

A novel, 96 pages. A young American scholar working in an Maltese monastery library makes an astonishing find: two previously unknown writings by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, the disordered stanzas of a narrative poem set on the island and fragmentary autobiographical material which echoes the poem’s shocking theme. What actually happened to Coleridge in Malta in 1805? Do these pages reveal a never suspected truth?

By the same author: Dr. Polidori’s Sketchbook, Dr. Jesus and Mr Dead, A Death By the Sea, A Spurious Dead in a Foreign Country.