Twice Upon a Time

In Twice Told Tales, Stern wonderfully reimagined classics of world literature—from Forster to Freud—in homage to their authors and the power of great writing.Twice Upon a Time continues the project, though this time Stern goes further, weaving stories around texts as diverse as Marx and Engels’s The Communist Manifesto and the poetry of Wallace Stevens. In “Bartleby the Scrivener,” Melville’s famous copyist is relocated to Hollywood; the hero is an agent who “would prefer not to retire.”

Infectiously clever, Twice Upon a Time enchants like the best of the authors to whom it pays tribute.