Part vivid historical drama, part melancholy fever dream, The Strange Beautiful centers on Mount Vernon Apartments in Spokane, Washington, offering a glimpse into the lives of ten tenants over a period of one hundred years.
In the opening story, The Songbird, we meet the building’s caretaker, a WWI veteran trying to rebuild his life amidst the Spanish flu epidemic. In The Telephone, a 21st-century poet’s longing for a bygone era nurtures a friendship that transcends time. A 1930s department store mannequin navigates the challenges of womanhood in the surreal, darkly humorous tale, The Mannequin. In The Suitcase, an exhausted woman scrambles to tidy up her boyfriend’s unprocessed emotions, which have materialized inside boxes all over the apartment. And in the final story The Mirror, a novelist believes she is the reincarnation of a Jewish Spokane socialite who inhabited her apartment 100 years before her.
As we witness the quiet but fraught moments of the tenants’ everyday lives, these uncanny narratives create a world that is at once familiar and fantastic.
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Fiction
The Strange Beautiful
- From the Publisher
September 1, 2023
Discussion Questions
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