The Book of Wonders by Douglas Trevor

The Book of Wonders by Douglas Trevor

A lonely female accountant falls for a man who seems to have stepped out of a Greek myth; a scholar uncovers a lost Shakespearean couplet and decides to quit academia; a celebrated author experiments with downloading a story from her brain and uploading it to another. In these and other stories, Douglas Trevor explores situations--both unsettling and comic--in which people lose their bearings, reinvent themselves, and resolve, sometimes haplessly, to make sense of their lives. Characters are kidnapped by teenagers; they are bitten by raccoons. Some of them go on Prozac; while others rely on bowling to persevere. Running through these nine stories is the ghostly, and at times material, presence of books themselves. What does it mean to turn to books for comfort? Or to uncover the ways in which the stories we absorb and revisit not only open up worlds but also close them off? In a variety of moods and settings, The Book of Wonders reminds us not only of the struggle to connect, but also of what the most unlikely of people may realize they share.

Douglas Trevor is a University of Iowa Assistant Professor of English. He has produced studies on Michel de Montaigne, Thomas More, Edmund Spenser, John Donne, George Herbert, and other early modern writers, and is co-editor of Historicism, Psychoanalysis, and Early Modern Civilization (2000). He also serves on the Editorial Board of the Shakespeare Yearbook and is a contributing editor for The Complete Pelican Shakespeare (2002).