Impressions of Lives Unseen
This article is only a portion of the full article. If you are already a premium subscriber please login. If you are not a premium subscriber, please subscribe for access to all of our content.

Everything Is Now: New and Collected Stories
by Michelle Cliff
University of Minnesota Press
248 pages, $24.95

THIS VOLUME is actually a compilation of two previously published collections of short stories and a set of new ones by Jamaican-born writer Michelle Cliff, who has taught at various universities in the United States. These stories occupy an impressive range of settings and genres, from contemporary realism to historical and fantasy fiction.

The title story, “Everything Is Now,” is about a woman, Cassandra, who’s on her way to visit her female lover when she suddenly enters the 1940’s, where a woman, Grace, has just received a telegram telling her that her boyfriend has been killed in the war. A