MACHINES OF ANOTHER ERA

Bess Winter is a Canadian-American writer. She has written on the topics of: dolls, mummies, taxidermy, death, horse tails, stolen eggs, Victorians, primates, private school girls, daguerreotypes, gas leaks, etc. Her work appears in American Short Fiction, Gettysburg Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, Ecotone, W.W. Norton’s Flash Fiction International, and elsewhere, and has been awarded a Pushcart Prize and the American Short[er] Fiction Prize. She lives in Urbana, IL.

_________________________________

Praise for Machines of Another Era

 “Opening these pages is like stepping through a secret doorway to discover a menagerie of wonders, impossibly beautiful. There are sentences here so fine, so perfectly worded, they made me gasp. Unsettling, mysterious, slightly subversive, deeply moving, these stories are small punches to the heart. Though collectively they feel huge, as if Bess Winter drew them from the worlds of a dozen novels, so richly populated are they with ideas, desires, dreams. Machines of Another Era is the startling debut of a thrilling new voice on the literary scene.” — Josh Weil, National Book Foundation 5 under 35 honoree and author of The Age of Perpetual Light

 

“Bess Winter’s stories are lovely and lithe and odd; much like scraps of paper and curious photographs found tucked away in old books, they haunt in corners of the mind for a long time after reading, full of ephemera and wonder.” –Amber Sparks, author of And I Do Not Forgive You

 

“Like Steven Millhauser, Bess Winter knows that it’s by the miniature that we grasp the universe: in her surprising, meticulously-wrought short stories, she uncovers the hidden tales behind historical oddities, reveals how every trinket is varnished with wonder and want, and reminds us that even the smallest human desire might grow to shape a world.” —Matt Bell, author of Scrapper 

 

“My favorite reading experience is to be simultaneously wrecked by story and exhilarated by the author’s invention and technique. That’s what this collection offers, beginning to end. These stories are distinctive, powerfully moving, and exquisitely well-written. Please join me in the Bess Winter Fan Club.”—Chris Bachelder, author of The Throwback Special and 2016 National Book Award Finalist

 

“No one writes quite like Bess Winter. Her stories are at once playful and mournful, so witty and so clever, and yet also haunted by the specter of lost things and lost time. Machines of Another Era draws readers into the lives of creators and collectors, of anachronistic characters tinged always with the yearning of nostalgia as they care for garnets and dolls and even postage-stamped babies. These stories are sharp and lush and an absolute pleasure to read.”—Anne Valente, author of The Desert Sky Before Us

 

“It’s customary, I suppose, to say something like ‘Bess Winter is a writer to watch,’ but she’s not: Bess Winter is a writer to be utterly transfixed by, a writer to gape and goggle at. The varied and splendid stories in MACHINES OF ANOTHER ERA are marvels of compression, of invention, and of lyricism.”—Michael Griffith, author of Trophy

 

“I loved these stories, each as precisely cut and shimmery as a jewel. Bess Winter conjures moments out of history with a virtuosic combination of research and imagination. In her hands every object is a magical one, every life a fantastic tale.” –Leah Stewart, author of What You Don’t Know About Charlie Outlaw