Imagine a Hollywood encounter between Helen Keller and Frida Kahlo, “two female icons of disability.” Or the story of “Moby Dick, or, The Leg,” told from Ahab’s perspective. What if Vincent Van Gogh resided in a twentieth-century New York hotel, surviving on food stamps and direct communications with God? Or if the dwarf pictured in a seventeenth-century painting by Velazquez should tell her story? And, finally, imagine the encounter between David and Goliath from the Philistine’s point of view. These are the characters who people history and myth as counterpoints to the “normal.” And they are also the characters who populate Anne Finger’s remarkable short stories. Affecting but never sentimental, ironic but never cynical, these wonderfully rich and comic tales reimagine life beyond the margins of “normality.”

Anne Finger has published four other books, including two works of nonfiction, Elegy for a Disease: A Personal and Cultural History of Polio (St. Martin's Press) and Past Due: A Story of Disability, Pregnancy and Birth (Seal Press); a collection of short stories, Basic Skills (University of Missouri Press); and a novel, Bone Truth (Coffee House Press). She has taught creative writing at Wayne State University and the University of Texas, as a writer-in-residence at the Woman's Building in L.A and the San Francisco Independent Living Resource Center, and in elementary, middle, and high schools. She has been awarded residencies at Yaddo, Djerassi, Centrum, and Hedgebrook. Her short fiction has appeared in the Southern Review, Kenyon Review, and Ploughshares, among other journals.