The Usual Star and The Moment
Two little-known story collections from H.D. that offer new ways of thinking about the role of the short story genre in the writer’s career and the modernist movement
The Imagist poet H.D. is widely regarded as one of the most innovative writers of free verse in English. In the last few decades, her poetry and novels have received increasing scholarly attention, but her short prose has rarely been studied. Until now, many of her short stories have been inaccessible for readers, either long out of print 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 The Moment, 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 critical introduction and explanatory notes that frame the stories in their historic, literary, and social context, this volume argues for the serious study of H.D.’s work in this genre.
The stories featured 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 and practice. This edition situates the stories, some biographically based, within the larger arc of H.D.’s life and career. H.D.’s short stories offer a glimpse into the art and experiences of a queer woman writer of the modernist era.
“Vetter’s edition resets a long-standing imbalance in our perception of H.D. It turns out that modernism’s consummate Imagist started off as a short story writer—and that she continued making stories as she turned toward the long poem in her postwar career. Vetter offers lively and informed orientations to these recovered stories, making them accessible to critics, teachers, and students and restoring a major modernist’s origin story.”—Marsha Bryant, author of Women’s Poetry and Popular Culture
“This volume of short stories will valuably augment understanding of H.D.’s multidimensional oeuvre. As a leading H.D. scholar, Vetter provides a richly informative introduction, placing H.D.’s short fiction in the context of the modernist short story, H.D.’s experiments with prose starting in the 1920s, and H.D.’s life as a queer female writer among the avant-garde.”—Miranda Hickman, author of The Geometry of Modernism
H.D. (born Hilda Doolittle, 1886–1961) was an American expatriate writer whose work exerted enormous influence on modernist poetry and prose. Lara Vetter is professor of English at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. She is the author of A Curious Peril: HD’s Late Modernist Prose and the editor of H.D.’s By Avon River.
