An unnamed narrator attends an elite but perennially freezing private girls’ school in New York City during the 1960’s. At first almost invisible, she evolves from seven-year-old witness to fifteen-year-old actor as she navigates a Halloween party, observes a classmate’s sudden hair growth, and encounters two eccentric teachers. Zombies, fetal pigs, Shakespeare, and cigarettes make appearances in this linked set of flash fiction stories which weave in and out of magical realism and affirm the possibility of survival even under the most peculiar conditions. Includes illustrations by Dennis Callaci. Check out the trailer with a reading by author.
Stephanie Barbé Hammer’s eleven stories of magical realism are brilliant bijou-parables: A girl—once invisible—when dressed as a boy, becomes visible. Obedience to rules—when exposed as arbitrary—reveals the role of language in defining reality. In “Risers” a stage curtain hides the memory of Anne Frank, the teenage Jewish diarist who was arrested by the Gestapo and died in the holocaust. Although written as fiction The Warbler School Chronicles are true postmodern masterpieces.
—Ben Stoltzfus, author of Romoland and The Nine Lives of Big JP