MacDonald Harris

Wealthy young dilettante Alys is as out of place in the Los Angeles of the 1980s as he is on the film sets of the 1920s. And yet that is exactly where he ends up, thanks to the intervention of a film director named Nesselrode, who seems to have traveled straight from the dawn of Hollywood into the present, and who, one day, leads Alys into the catacombs of an abandoned movie theater. The pair emerges in a black-and-white fantasia where silent films...

An inventive historical novel that delves into the mysteries of gender identity, from the National Book Award–nominated author of The Balloonist. With a foreword by Michael Chabon As a child in Southern California at the dawn of the twentieth century, Herma exhibits an incredible talent for vocal mimicry. Her gift will eventually take her from the choir of her country church to the Paris Opera, thanks in no small part to the machinations of her...

A merchant seaman is the sole survivor when his ship is sunk in a battle in the South Pacific. Badly burned, he is stripped of every shred of identity and cast into the sea, naked, faceless, nameless. Rescued and lying in a Pearl Harbor hospital, he is mistakenly identified as the missing Lt. Ben Davenant by Davenant's wife. In the moment, the man decides to go along, to take on Davenant's identity, to return with her to California and take on his...