Overview

This collection of Robie Macauley's short fiction, published from 1941 to 1993, considers deception, real and imaginary, deliberate and accidental: a spy masquerading as a French teacher, transvestites, adulterous spouses, embarrassed guests fleeing a house party, a salesman trying to garner a lucrative contract, the vivid fantasies of a lost child, the wandering mind of an elderly gentleman, the paranoid hallucinations of an aging husband, the spectral girl in the black raincoat, and a young wife's eerie dreams.

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Born in Grand Rapids, Michigan, in 1919, Robie Macauley served as an officer in the Counter-Intelligence Corps (CIC) of the 97th Infantry Division during World War II. After the war, he taught literature and writing at Bard College, at the University of Iowa Writer's Workshop, and at the University of North Carolina. He was editor of The Kenyon Review from 1959 to 1966 and Fiction Editor at Playboy from 1967 to 1977. Later he taught fiction in the MFA program at the University of Illinois at Chicago, before becoming a Senior Editor at Houghton Mifflin. While teaching at the Harvard Extension School in 1990, he co-founded and co-directed the Ploughshares International Writing Seminars, a summer program of the Emerson College European Center at Kasteel Well in the Netherlands. He died in Boston on November 20, 1995. Robie Macauley's literary career spanned 50 years, during which he published two novels (The Disguises of Love in 1953 and A Secret History of Time to Come in 1979), a collection of short stories (The End of Pity, McDowell, Obolensky, 1957) and coauthored a popular textbook on writing fiction (Technique in Fiction, Harper & Row, 1964; revised and republished by St. Martin's Press in 1987). Between 1941 and 1993 he published over 150 short stories. His short fiction appeared in Furioso, The North American Review, The Kenyon Review, The Sewanee Review, The Partisan Review, The Southern Review, Shenandoah, Esquire, Fiction, Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, Cosmopolitan, Playboy, and The Virginia Quarterly Review, for which he was awarded the Furioso Prize (1949), the O. Henry Award (1951, 1956 and 1967), and the John Train Humor Prize (1990). His work has been translated into Dutch, German, Italian, Spanish and Japanese. Two novels were published posthumously: Citadel of Ice (2014) and The Escape of Alfred Dreyfus (2018).

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