Winesburg, Ohio

Anderson opens with a discarded frame, 'The Book of the Grotesque,' in which an old writer proposes that the world once held countless truths, and that anyone who seizes a single one and lives by it alone becomes a grotesque. Every story that follows tests that idea on a different resident of Winesburg: Wing Biddlebaum in 'Hands,' whose expressive teacher's hands were misread as molestation and who has spent twenty years training himself to keep them still; Alice Hindman in 'Adventure,' who waits years for a lover who never returns and one rainy night runs naked into the street calling to a stranger; Kate Swift in 'The Teacher,' whose attempt to reach George honestly collapses into a scene neither of them can name afterward. Each character carries one truth jealously, and each eventually tries to hand it to George, a local reporter still too young to know what to do with any of it.

George's own mother, Elizabeth Willard, runs through the book as its most persistent grotesque, a woman who married the wrong man, buried an acting career she never had, and spends 'Mother' watching her son for some sign he might escape the fate she didn't. Anderson never lets the stories build into a plot; instead they accumulate around George as listener, a role the book assigns him before he has any say in it, until the town's failed intimacies, not any single romance or ambition, become the actual subject.

Anderson places 'Hands' first for a reason: Wing Biddlebaum's history as a small-town teacher whose habit of touching his students' hair and shoulders gets willfully misread as abuse, driving him out of Pennsylvania and into decades of hiding his own gestures, sets a pattern every later grotesque varies without ever literally repeating it. Each one after Wing is defined by one distinguishing habit or restraint, and the narrator's refusal to explain Wing fully, leaving the reader to infer what was actually lost, becomes the method the whole collection uses on everyone else.