Maestro: Stories

Maestro, a collection of thematically linked short fiction about expertise, intimacy, and music, flouts boundaries between authority and uncertainty, the individual and the other, through the title story’s conductor, who must perform a competence beyond any one person’s capacity—imagining how it feels to voice each character and play every instrument—to orchestrate a concerted effort. The experiments in perspective across the collection are influenced by nineteenth-century omniscience in which the authorial narrator exhibits a distinct personality at once human and knowing. The heightened formal effects of second-person point of view or free indirect discourse emphasize the virtuosic suspension of disbelief and the etudes in empathy and authority that all fiction demands; for a moment, the readers inhabit the characters and assume the position of the maestro.