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by Carla Nappi CONJECTURES #4 For the most part, working professional historians bring to their sources a fundamentally forensic sensibility: they tend to treat their archival scraps like so many clues , which, rightly read, permit the reconstruction of events and persons. There is much to be said for this program, which works pretty well. But it does have its limits. For instance, certain old tidbits afford a queer intimacy with the past that seems to exceed their evidentiary utility. A death mask may display, trapped in white plaster, a single hair once belonging to the human whose visage we contemplate. The hair is of severely limited utility to a practicing historian, yet it rather seethes with an urgent presencing of the past — and that clearly has something to do with the work of history. So what’s to be done? In this excerpt from a larger project, the imaginative historian of Chinese science Carla Nappi permits a dreamscape to rise from four archival fragments — four obliqu...

The following is from Adam O'Riordan’s short story collection , The Burning Ground. The Burning Ground is a collection of eight stories about men haunted by their past: from a painter tormented by memories of a lover to a father trying to rekindle a relationship with his son. Adam O’Riordan’s poetry collection In the Flesh won the Somerset Maugham Award , awarded to the best writer under the age of 35. He is an academic director at Manchester Metropolitan University . Alannah would always come at two o’clock as she had on her first visit. But they never talked about how they might exist outside of the confines of the studio. Then at Easter a fortnight passed without her visiting. He had delayed his own trip to see his sister in Harrogate. By the third week, when two o’clock came he was pacing the studio, snapping the slats in the battered brushed-metal blind, peering down on to the parked cars on the street below. He had first met Alannah and her husband at the same party. He had...