“Joan Wickersham’s brilliant The News from Spain shows, in all its twisty beauty, what a short story collection can do. The stories are gorgeous in themselves, but the way they speak to each other is truly extraordinary.” —Elizabeth McCracken, author of An Exact Replica of a Figment of My Imagination

A story from this collection, “The Assignation, or The News from Spain” appeared in NER 31.2.

From the jacket copy: “Joan Wickersham is also the author of the acclaimed memoir The Suicide Index, a virtuosic collection of stories, each a stirring parable of the power of love and the impossibility of understanding, much less controlling, it. In these seven beautifully wrought variations on a theme, a series of characters trace and retrace eternal yet ever-changing patterns of love and longing, connection and loss. The stories range over centuries and continents–from 18th-century Vienna to America in the 1940s. With uncanny emotional exactitude, Wickersham shows how we never really know what’s in someone else’s heart, or in our own; how we continually try to explain others and to console ourselves; and how love, like storytelling, is ultimately a work of the imagination.”

The News from Spain is available at Powell’s and other booksellers.