History can look reassuringly orderly from a distance. There are names we are taught to remember, wars that receive chapters, and people whose lives become footnotes. Fantasy is uniquely able to put the forgotten back in the center of the story. In The Slantwise Histories, Alix E. Harrow lets magic unsettle our assumptions about what the past was and whose version deserves to survive.
The book brings together celebrated earlier short fiction and five new stories. Ghosts, dreamers, soldiers, mothers, workers and unlikely places move through the collection. It includes the Hugo-winning A Witch's Guide to Escape: A Practical Compendium of Portal Fantasies as well as other stories that approach myth, history and ordinary acts of resistance from unexpected angles.
A collection of short stories is especially useful for a book club that wants room to compare perspectives. Instead of asking everyone to finish an enormous fantasy epic, members can choose two stories and consider how each handles agency, power and the telling of legends. When a story changes the rules of history, is that an escape from reality or a way of revealing something real about it?
We picked this as a welcoming route into Harrow's imaginative range. Readers familiar with her novels may discover a more concentrated version of her themes, while newcomers can begin with one story at a time. The US collection is scheduled for October 20, 2026, so this is a clearly labeled preorder recommendation, not a claim to have read an unreleased volume.
Original editorial recommendation based on the publisher's synopsis, official author biography and release information—not a claim to have read the full book or obtained author approval.
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