Pages From The Textbook Of Alternate History

• Pages From The Textbook Of Alternate History
• Price: $18.00
• Phong Nguyen
• Fiction, Short Fiction
• 158 pages | PB
• ISBN 978-1-7320091-9-6

A collection of alternate-history stories that explore the original intentions of major historical figures.

REVIEWS

Asian American Writers’ Workshop
The Collagist
Dia Critics
AList

ABOUT

At critical moments in world history, every political, spiritual, and cultural leader foresaw a different destiny. Columbus planned a Western sea route to Asia; Hitler applied to art school twice; Joan of Arc prophesied that she would become a mother. It is out of their failures that history itself is made. But what if the history-makers succeeded in the fulfillment of their best-laid plans? In Pages from the Textbook of Alternate History, Phong Nguyen explores a myriad of pasts in which these icons of history made a different choice, and got what they wished for.

PRAISE

“The stories in Phong Nguyen’s Pages from the Textbook of Alternate History bravely reinvigorate and reimagine the biographies of our culture’s heroes and villains, offering new vantages from which to see the decisions that shaped our world: Smart and witty, these stories deliver one after another, each reopening the eternal questions of how we got to be who we are, of where we came from and where we might go next.”
– Matt Bell, author of Cataclysm Baby and In the House Upon the Dirt Between the Lake and the Woods

“Phong Nguyen’s Pages from the Textbook of Alternate History is an astonishing and audacious book—alternately poetic and spooky, heartbreaking and hilarious, a profound examination of the way the past has shaped us.”
– Dan Chaon, author of Ill Will

“In Pages from the Textbook of Alternate History, Phong Nguyen explores fiction’s greatest question—’What if?’—in stories that are generous, incisive, daring, and endlessly inventive. By altering our history, Nguyen brilliantly reveals our present.”
– Michael Kardos, author of Bluff

“Like Borges’ A Universal History of Infamy, Phong Nguyen’s Pages from the Textbook of Alternate History explores the frailty of the past, and the pasts that might have been: Siddhartha, failing to conquer attachment, settles for no more than conquering the world, and Hitler dies as a young soldier in World War I, killed in the moment his aesthetic threatens to transcend kitsch. Avert the futures in which you haven’t read this.”
– Zachary Mason, author of The Lost Books of the Odyssey

“Pages from the Textbook of Alternate History is strange and smart. You will read it thinking that you know the stories, and you do, just never before quite like this. What if Jesus was never crucified? What if the bomb was never dropped on Hiroshima? What if there was no America? Nguyen’s Alternate History stories expose history itself as nothing more than a collection of well-told stories.”
– Tiphanie Yanique, author of The Land of Love and Drowning