Matthew Pearl’s first novel, The Dante Club (2003), surprised critics with its erudite blending of history and mystery in a tale of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and post-Civil War Boston. In his second novel, The Poe Shadow (2006), Pearl re-created Edgar Allan Poe and life in mid-nineteenth-century Baltimore in a second critic-wowing and New York Times best-selling historical thriller.

Fanny Howe’s A Winter Sun: Notes on a Vocation emerges from the past even as it dwells within it. Future and past come together, united by images of a child at a threshold, a frozen foot poised to go forward, a mushroom cloud.