THE SECRET HISTORY OF FAMOUS PEOPLE

Elliott illuminates the lives of various personages from history in this fiction collection.

Famous historical figures—they’re just like us. Take the example of the young glovemaker who falls in with a band of actors when they stop by his hometown of Stratford. After filling in for a small part, his castmates recognize the man’s incredible command of language and offer him the opportunity to step into a much greater role. Or consider the New England woman who, while grieving her newly dead sister, makes an unexpected discovery when sorting through a chest of the deceased’s personal items. “Why, there must be at least forty booklets, each thick with pages, each booklet carefully bound with a string,” thinks Lavinia Dickinson. “She opened the one on top, turned a few pages, and let out a gasp. Poems. Hundreds of poems.” The woman had promised her sister Emily that she would burn whatever she found, but could she have meant these secret writings? In these 10 stories, Elliott offers fictional (or fictionalized) windows into notable lives, shedding light on the exceptional biographies of the likes of Ferdinand Magellan, Ada Lovelace, and Billy the Kid. (In one tale, a decidedly not famous history buff named Bob Mitty goes on a time-traveling reality show that allows him to live temporarily as three of his heroes from the past.) The more compelling stories are those in which the protagonists’ biographies are not as well known, including “The Hidden World” (about Dutch microbiologist Antonie van Leeuwenhoek), “The Charioteer’s Tale” (about the late Roman charioteer Faustinus), and “Thou Shalt Not” (about the author’s ancestor, the Quaker Nathan Elliott, who attempts to keep his son out of the American Civil War). One story follows a boy having trouble at school who finds preternatural confidence after an encounter with Muhammad Ali. While not all of the pieces offer new insights into the figures they touch upon—or even provide entirely satisfying narrative arcs—the collection succeeds in transporting the reader back in time…at least as far as grade school history class.

An immersive collection of time-hopping short stories.