Machines of Another Era

by Bess Winter

"Opening these pages is like stepping through a secret doorway to discover a menagerie of wonders, impossibly beautiful. There are sentences here so fine, so perfectly worded, they made me gasp. Unsettling, mysterious, slightly subversive, deeply moving, these stories are small punches to the heart. Though collectively they feel huge, as if Bess Winter drew them from the worlds of a dozen novels, so richly populated are they with ideas, desires, dreams. Machines of Another Era is the startling debut of a thrilling new voice on the literary scene." - Josh Weil, National Book Foundation 5 under 35 honoree and author of The Age of Perpetual Light


"Bess Winter's stories are lovely and lithe and odd; much like scraps of paper and curious photographs found tucked away in old books, they haunt in corners of the mind for a long time after reading, full of ephemera and wonder." -Amber Sparks, author of And I Do Not Forgive You

Genres: Short Stories, Fiction, Anthologies

170 pages, Paperback

Published January 1, 2021

About the author

Bess Winter has written on the topics of: dolls, mummies, taxidermy, death, horse tails, stolen eggs, Victorians, primates, private school girls, daguerreotypes, gas leaks, etc. Her work appears in American Short Fiction, Gettysburg Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, Ecotone, W.W. Norton’s Flash Fiction International, and elsewhere, and has been awarded a Pushcart Prize and the American Short[er] Fiction Prize. She’s received fellowships and scholarships from Yaddo and the Sewanee Writers’ Conference. She grew up in Toronto, Canada. She has taught creative writing to kids, teens, and adults at StoryStudio Chicago, WordPlay Cincinnati, and elsewhere. She’s an Assistant Professor of English at Eastern Illinois University, where she’s Editor-in-Chief of Bluestem. Her debut collection, Machines of Another Era, will be released by Gold Wake Press in 2021. Think of an old lady’s life: gardening, knitting, tucking sweaters in among mothballs, gluing the arm back onto a 19th century doll. That’s what she does when she’s not writing.

Reviews

[Joe Sacksteder]

My review is up on Kenyon Review

[Brad Felver · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a remarkable collection of stories. Bess Winter has such a discerning eye, and what she chooses to examine is always strange in the loveliest possible way. I found it especially impressive how she can write about nostalgia without letting the story itself tumble into a nostalgic sort of sentimentality. There's something didactic in most of these stories, though never enough to obscure so much as to augment the stories with interesting and quirky ideas. They ask questions that don't have clean answers, giving them an elusive quality that haunts you after reading.

[Greg · Rating 5 out of 5]

Machines of Another Era is a shortish collection of short stories, previously published in short-run literary journals. Shortish does not mean a quick read, though. It's hard to sum up a rather eclectic group of stories into a single sentence, but if I had to, I'd say that the author writes about the complex feelings of ordinary people at particularly interesting moments of their lives, and she does so in a way that will have you ruminating on your own complex feelings at those particular points of your own life -- and therefore these stories are best read slowly, one at a time, preferably right before taking a long walk. Reading them all at once will just make your head crowded, because at least a good subset will stick with you for a while, and they will all want their own space.

Some of these stories are historical, some are about working-class people, and some are set in Toronto, although in an older Toronto, before the real estate boom. A couple of decades ago, I assembled automotive shocks on the midnight shift in a now-demolished factory in Long Branch, and when I left the plant I would walk east until I was tired enough to board the streetcar and head home -- through New Toronto, into Mimico, and sometimes right to the shore of Lake Ontario, because I have always been one for staring at large bodies of water and at that point the water is quite close to the streetcar line. You don't care, I'm sure, but I say this because the author describes that view, looking east towards a shining downtown from a rundown park backed by rundown rentals, and she describes just how it feels to take in that view, and she nails it. It is just so. I have no reason to believe the rest of the book isn't just so as well.

I suppose I should mention that received this book as part of a Goodreads giveaway, and I appreciate this, and that's why I'm writing this review instead of keeping my thoughts to myself like I usually do -- but I don't believe the freebie has overly influenced my review. If you're like me, you will like this.

[Elgin · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book was one of those featured on a "short reads" display in our library. Usually I prefer long novels to short stories, but the title intrigued me. I picked up the book and opened it to a random page and read "I like to make people out of walnuts." How could I pass up a book with that line?

A poor working dad fails the test of fatherhood in his support of a daughter in a fly killing contest; a young woman's voice fron the past is preserved on a primitive record from an Edison talking doll; a war prisoner makes models of ships from the bones of dead French soldiers; a handsome man takes a girl out into the snowy country side to make tracks with her collection of shoes.

These stories, for the most part set in Ontario, are masterpieces. Most of them are somewhat edgy or mildly bizarre. Reading this collection reminded of me of walking through an art gallery looking at paintings that evoked a feeling of brooding thoughtfulness. Or some shit like that.

[Bob · Rating 1 out of 5]

Very boring, uninspired, and the story was very procedural, it seemed more like an outline than a actual story or journey. If you are looking for a story that isn't contrived where the novel isn't just check boxes to fill out pages I would give this a hard pass.

P.S. Most of the reviews are from the author's fellow writers and peers not actual critics or readers. You can tell this if you read the back of the book which lists writers, one of who also posted a review on good reads. Buyer beware!

Très ennuyeux, sans inspiration, et l'histoire était très procédurale, cela ressemblait plus à un aperçu qu'à une histoire ou un voyage réel. Si vous recherchez une histoire qui n'est pas inventée où le roman n'est pas seulement des cases à cocher pour remplir les pages, je donnerais une passe difficile.

La plupart des critiques proviennent de collègues écrivains et de pairs de l'auteur, et non de véritables critiques ou lecteurs. Vous pouvez le dire si vous lisez le dos du livre qui répertorie le nom de l'écrivain, dont certains ont également publié une critique sur les bonnes lectures. Acheteur, méfiez-vous !

[Susanne Bayliss · Rating 5 out of 5]

Each story in the collection is like a polished gem – complete and unique. The reader is transported to a different time and place with each new narrative. We experience pathos, wonder, and comic relief at different times and we are left slightly off balance. For example, in 'Helena, Montana' we laugh and are awestruck at the same time to discover a baby in the mail. 'The Garnet Cave' seems to be a fantasy – but we are not quite sure. 'The Stories you Write about Mimico' may be part historic and part autobiographical. 'A Beautiful Song' evokes the old Toronto of 1912 in all its odiferous, insect-infested, muddy glory. The stories were great fun to read – my compliments to Bess, who is a great talent.

[Tiffany]

There are stories in here that are little shiny gems. "A Beautiful Song." "Helena, Montana." "Lord Byron's Teen Lover." And I get to hear them all in the voice of my dear friend Bess, whose work I've loved since we were in high school.

[James Dunham · Rating 5 out of 5]

It's hard to explain how strongly the final story in this collection manages to elevate the entire book, but I'll attempt it. Many of these stories explore historical oddities, like defective talking dolls voiced by women working in Thomas Edison's factories, or the practice of disguising mothers into objects to help pose infants for photographic portraits. Other stories here take a more surrealistic approach, as when a mailman delivers a baby, in the postal sense, or an old woman literally consumes all the words she's written in her life. The blending of real and unreal is what ties the collection together, and the final story marries historical fiction with, it appears, memoir, in a kind of moving metafiction full of subtlety and grace (now there's a phrase I never thought I'd write). It makes personal the mixing of fact and fiction, history and memory, realism and surrealism, so skillfully and in so short a space, that it adds (or reveals) a new layer of thoughtfulness and depth to all which precedes it, and acts a capstone that coheres the whole work. Beautifully done.

[Tina Olah · Rating 4 out of 5]

Review coming soon!

[Jeannine · Rating 5 out of 5]

Recordings in dolls, walnut people, Oscar Peterson’s penthouse and teenage shoplifters fill this collection with life and strangeness and humor. What a joy to read!

[David Bontumasi · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a glorious book, a wonderful collection of stories and characters. Just the right size in so many ways, with a lovely array of stories.

Ms. Winter is a gifted writer, as adept with flash fiction as she is with longer prose, and her characters are real and nuanced, with wants and irrational needs, with secrets and just a “little bit of odd” to enrapture and entice the reader. I have thought about many of these stories and a few of these characters long after I turned the last page.

MACHINES OF ANOTHER ERA is what a short story collection should be, for me: like a glorious find in a resale shop, tucked away, waiting to be discovered.

[Linda · Rating 4 out of 5]

A collection of short stories. Some of them I loved. Others I couldn’t get into. But a true joy to read! Lovely language. ❤️