We Show What We Have Learned And Other Stories [Paperback]

Winner of the Bard Fiction Prize and a finalist for the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for debut fiction, the Young Lions Fiction Award, and the Shirley Jackson Award for a single-author collection

Joyce Carol Oates calls Clare Beams wickedly sharp-eyed, wholly unpredictable...a female / feminist voice for the twenty-first century.

The literary, historic, and fantastic collide in these wise and exquisitely unsettling stories. From bewildering assemblies in school auditoriums to the murky waters of a Depression-era health resort, Beamss landscapes are tinged with other?worldliness, and her characters desires stretch the limits of reality.

Ing?nues at a boarding school bind themselves to their headmasters vision of perfection; a nineteenth-century landscape architect embarks on his first major project, but finds the terrain of class and power intractable; a bride glimpses her husbands past when she wears his World War II parachute as a gown; and a teacher comes undone in front of her astonished fifth graders.

As they capture the strangeness of being human, the stories inWe Show What We Have Learnedreveal Clare Beamss rare and capacious imaginationand yet they are grounded in emotional complexity, illuminating the ways we attempt to transform ourselves, our surroundings, and each other.

Stories as well executed as these are their own reward, but its also clear from the capaciousness on display here that Ms. Beams has novels worth of worlds inside her.New York Times

A richly imagined and impeccably crafted debut...from the unflagging elegance of the prose to the wisdom with which Beams approaches the complex emotional terrain her characters navigate.Kirkus(starred review), Best Debut Fiction of 2016

Imaginative, unsettling, and relentlessly sharp, the nine stories of the book are full of immersive detail and fully realized narrators thlS6