2"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