“Where Their Fire Is Not Quenched”, the opening tale of May Sinclair’s Uncanny Stories (1923), imagines hell as a hotel room in Paris: a locked door, a despised lover, one sin repeated for eternity. Paired here with the final story, “The Finding of the Absolute”, in which a man is led by Kant into cubic time, and dissolves into the beating heart of God. Together the tales trace a divine comedy in miniature: two indelible visions of the afterlife from an unjustly forgotten voice of modernism.

May Sinclair (1863–1946) — novelist, philosopher, critic, suffragist — published twenty-three novels and numerous collections of poetry and prose. A champion of modernism, she was the first critic to use the phrase “stream of consciousness” in connection to literature. The stories in this edition spring from her lifelong preoccupation with psychology and the gothic. While finishing a group biography of the Brontës in 1912, Sinclair informed a friend that she had begun to write “stories of all queer lengths & all queer subjects; ‘spooky’ ones some of them.” Presented here, two of her finest.