Author Picks

Five Great Historical Fictions

Sheila Kohler

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Farewell, My Queen

By Chantal Thomas

Farewell, My Queen by Chantal Thomas. In this novel, which won the Prix Femina, Chantal Thomas manages to marry stringent research with creative freedom, recreating with uncanny verisimilitude the last days at the court of Versailles. Through the eyes of Agathe-Sidonie, the Queen’s lectrice—she reads aloud and tries to capture her wandering attention—we follow events between 6:00 a.m. on July 14 to midnight on July 16, 1789.
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The Blue Flower

By Penelope Fitzgerald

The Blue Flower by Penelope Fitzgerald. This is the story of the young poet Frederick von Hardenburg, later known as Novalis, and his “heart’s heart” Sophie von Kuhn, with whom he falls in love when she is twelve years old. A deceptively simple novel by an artist who has both the knowledge of the way things were in the Eighteenth Century and the subtlety to convey an emotional truth.

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Wild Nights

By Joyce Carol Oates

Wild Nights by Joyce Carol Oates. My favorite in these wonderfully original stories about the last days of Poe, Dickinson, Twain, James, and Hemingway is “EDickinson RepliLuxe.” Here Emily Dickinson is portrayed as a mannequin empowered by a computer program with her original soul intact but without her heart, blood, her sex organs, or her gastrointestinal system. Though expensive, she is bought by a couple: the Krims, a tax attorney and his wife, who has a reputation for being “active” and “involved” in Golders Green.
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The Master

By Colm Tóibín

The Master by Colm Tóibín. All the disquiet and drama of a famous life in this intimate portrayal of a writer, written by a writer who is a modern master himself, of the historical novel that Henry James said it was not possible to write.

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Hotel de Dream

By Edmund White

Hotel de Dream by Edmund White. A double love story with Stephen Crane, who lies dying, and his wife, Cora, who has been the Madame in a Florida brothel; and a painted boy and his banker lover, who exist only in the novel Stephen Crane never wrote.