We Show What We Have Learned & Other Stories

The literary, historic, and fantastic collide in these wise and exquisitely unsettling stories from debut author Clare Beams. From bewildering assemblies in school auditoriums to the murky waters of a Depression-era health resort, her landscapes are tinged with otherworldliness, and her characters' desires stretch the limits of reality. Ingnues at a boarding school bind themselves to their headmaster's vision of perfection; a nineteenth-century landscape architect embarks on his first major project, but finds the terrain of class and power intractable; a bride glimpses her husband's past when she wears his World War II parachute as a gown. As they capture the strangeness of being human, the stories in We Show What We Have Learned reveal Beams's rare and capacious imaginationand yet they are grounded in emotional complexity, illuminating the ways we attempt to transform ourselves, our surroundings, and each other.