Flappers & Fiction

Cathchaline grew up wild among the crumbling walls of Château de Gravamont, a girl who understood the language of lizards better than the laws of men. Her world was simple until her cousin Pascal traded his peasant’s blouse for the smuggler’s sash, drawing them both into the perilous intrigue of the Spanish border. When a storm-swept night brings the douaniers too close to the hidden pass, Cathchaline must leave the safety of the ruins to face a tragedy that will earn her a strange, haunting name along the Basque coast.

Miss Susan Van Antwerp allows her life to be dictated by exactly one feature: her formidable, aristocratic nose. It is the reason she selects her millinery with such fuss, and perhaps the reason she disowned her beloved nephew for marrying a “snub-nosed nobody.” But when she purchases a particular brown bonnet, she unknowingly walks away with a desperate secret stitched into the crown. It seems a twenty-dollar bill and a serendipitous mistake are about to force a confrontation that pride alone cannot resolve.

Lumous Cox is a man so painfully shy he eats his lunch on a basement packing crate, only truly coming alive when he vanishes into the crowd at the Tremont Theater. But one evening, it isn’t the actors on stage who capture his imagination, but a whispered conversation in the seat next to him regarding the appendicula vermiformis. Convinced a stray apple seed has sealed his fate, this solitary clerk trades his playbills for medical texts. It is a peculiar, poignant tale about the terrifying power of suggestion and how a simple idea can prove far more dangerous than any physical ailment.

The Widow Blake stands at her garden gate every time the train whistles, waiting for a boy who fled a fairground fight eleven years ago. She does not recognize the massive, melancholy lion tamer who arrives with Slate’s Great Moral Hippodrome, nor does he know the white-haired woman watching him from the weeds. But when the lions turn on their master, the wounded giant is carried to her door. In the delirium of pain, a terrified confession about a jack-knife and a “murder” finally brings the wanderer home.

Amid the freezing mud of the Russo-Turkish War, a hardened correspondent befriends Maxime, a golden-haired romantic with a heavy heart. On the eve of battle, Maxime extracts a solemn vow; return his locket to his betrothed in France should he fall. But when the narrator arrives in the quiet streets of Douai to fulfill this sacred trust, he discovers a web of treachery that has replaced a lover with a liar. Now he faces a brutal choice; honor the dead by destroying a woman’s peace, or bury the truth forever.