Dictation: A Quartet

Dictation

The secretaries of Henry James and Joseph Conrad have a brief lesbian affair, and hatch a scheme to switch a paragraph from each of their bosses' new works.

Actors

An ageing Jewish actor with an Irish-sounding stage name lands the role of King Lear in an off-Broadway play written by the daughter of a famous Yiddish performer. Originally published in The New Yorker, and later in Cynthia Ozick Collected Stories.

At Fumicaro

An American man travels to the fictional town of Fumicaro, Italy, for a conference on Catholicism. While there, he meets a young chambermaid who is pregnant out of wedlock. He decides to marry her and take her back home to New York. The story takes place in the 1930s, after Benito Mussolini has taken power in the country. The characters in the story portray an eerie ambivalence to the idea of fascism. Originally published in The New Yorker, and later in Cynthia Ozick Collected Stories.

What Happened to the Baby

A young woman is directed to take care of her uncle, an eccentric man in the middle of creating a new universal language called "GNU," following his divorce. Originally published in The Atlantic, and later in Cynthia Ozick Collected Stories.