Unbridled Books, August 2025

The Dime Museum, a novel in stories, moves from Chicago to Philadelphia, rural Pennsylvania, and several European capitals, and from the early years of the twentieth century to the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic. The lives of its characters—a vaudevillian male impersonator, a Vietnam vet turned gardener, a disillusioned violinist, a disaffected feminist scholar, poets, nurses, nannies, mothers, and more—intersect in surprising ways, as they seek love, meaningful work, creative satisfaction, and to care for others and be cared for themselves. As they move through their own personal gains and losses, these characters’ intersecting lives are also intriguingly bound up with twentieth-century preoccupations like eugenics and literary modernism, along with the lives of poet Ezra Pound and art collector Albert Barnes. In the end, the youngest of the characters—nanny, poet, nurse, violinist—are left to face the daunting outcomes, like climate change, global migration, economic and healthcare crises, that surround us all in the wake of the tumultuous twentieth century.