Past Perfect

Cassie Jacobs, the narrator of the titular novella at the heart of Danielle Evans’s astonishing second collection, , works as a field agent for the Institute of Public History, a fictional federal agency “devoted to making the truth so accessible and appealing” that it cannot be ignored. Cassie’s job entails roaming Washington, D.C., in search of historical inaccuracies: a bakery hawking a Juneteenth cake as a way to celebrate the anniversary of the Emancipation. (Cassie would have you know it derives from , part of the French term for raw concrete, and not from .) Armed with a handheld printer, she churns out stickers correcting falsities, ornamenting the nation’s capital with Post-it notes of truth as a “solution for decades of bad information and bad faith use of it.”