Usual Star and The Moment

Two little-known story collections from H.D. that offernew ways of thinking about the role of the short story genre in the writerscareer and the modernist movementThe Imagist poet H.D.is widely regarded as one of the most innovative writers of free verse inEnglish. In the last few decades, her poetry and novels have received increasingscholarly attention, but her short prose has rarely been studied. Until now, manyof her short stories have been inaccessible for readers, either long out ofprint or never having been published.In this volume,Lara Vetter introduces two short story cycles by H.D.The Usual Star,which comprises two stories, The Usual Star and Two Americans; and TheMoment, which contains the stories Hesperia, Aegina, The Moment,Jubilee, The Last Time, The Death of Martin Presser, and The Guardians.Presenting these two collections in their entirety alongside a criticalintroduction and explanatory notes that frame the stories in their historic,literary, and social context, this volume argues for the serious study ofH.D.s work in this genre. The storiesfeatured in these collections were written between the 1920s and 1940s,offering an opportunity to study the format as it evolved in H.D.s thought andpractice. This edition situates the stories, some biographically based, withinthe larger arc of H.D.s life and career. H.D.s short stories offer a glimpseinto the art and experiences of a queer woman writer of the modernist era.