From Robert Coover’s The Public Burning to Lance Olsen’s Always Crashing in the Same Car, many novels over the past half century have used public figures like Richard Nixon and David Bowie as significant fictional characters.

Unlike traditional fiction where characters are “loosely based on” or “inspired by” real people, Coover’s and Olsen’s novels rely heavily on factual, biographical details. They name names. Yet, Coover and Olsen are neither biographers nor documentary novelists. They unapologetically invent, blending fact and fiction into a higher symbolic truth. 

My debut short story collection, Alternative Facts, likewise names names and explores the porous boundaries between fact and fiction, focusing specifically on figures who have ushered in our post-truth era. George W. Bush almost tells Jay Leno the truth about his paintings, Kellyanne Conway lands a punch, and Paris Hilton falls from a helicopter onto Thomas Pynchon’s fire escape, leading to a surreal adventure full of magical dentists, talking dogs, and unexpected friendships.

Compared to fictionalizing public figures in novels, fictionalizing public figures in short story collections presents unique challenges. The characters have less time to develop, and their stories must also converse with each other, returning to similar themes and building an arc across the collection. At the same time, the stories must vary enough stylistically and structurally to maintain the reader’s interest. 

Here are seven of my favorites, all masters of the form.

Various Antidotes by Joanna Scott

A finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award, Various Antidotes depicts both historical and imagined figures reckoning with scientific and medical innovations, including the mental asylum, progressive relaxation techniques, and chloroform. Throughout, Scott dazzles with her ability to write in a range of voices and prose styles while developing subtle linkages between individual stories. An early story about Charlotte Corday’s guillotine beheading, for example, resonates in a later story about Topsy the elephant’s public electrocution. Likewise, my three favorite stories in the collection—about the microscopist Antonie von Leeuwenhoek, the blind beekeeper Francis Huber, and a man proved sane by X-ray—revolve around themes of lost and enhanced vision. Although Scott is perhaps better known for her biographical novels Arrogance and Careers for Women, her beautifully and intelligently crafted collection of short biographical fictions holds its own.

Love in Infant Monkeys by Lydia Millet

Millet’s Love in Infant Monkeys was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and for good reason. The ten short stories, all revolving around human and animal relationships, show Millet at the height of her powers: satirical and insightful, hilarious and touching. The title story focuses on Harry Harlow, the famed American psychologist who cruelly separated infant rhesus monkeys from their mothers, demonstrating the importance of maternal contact. In Millet’s story, one of the mother monkeys confronts a drunk and depressed Harlow in a dream. In “Sexing the Pheasant,” one of my favorite stories in the collection, Madonna shoots a pheasant on her country estate and struggles over what to do with the dying bird. Relieve it of its misery? Wait for her husband to return and finish the job? Millet brilliantly depicts the pop star’s self-absorption and vulnerability, ending on a surprisingly tender note. 

Alive and Dead in Indiana by Michael Martone

As the title suggests, Martone’s debut collection includes eight short stories about well-known individuals, both living (at the time of publication) and dead, with ties to Indiana. In the poignant opening story, “Everybody Watching and the Time Passing like That,” James Dean’s indignant, flustered high school drama teacher, Adeline Mart Nall, recalls where she was when she learned of her famous former pupil’s death. In another favorite, the understated “Whistler’s Father,” the painter James McNeill Whistler’s father, who died when his son was only sixteen, quietly muses from beyond the grave about why his son didn’t paint his portrait. Although the collection was published when Martone was only in his late twenties, the writing already displays his later fiction’s hallmark playfulness, pop cultural fluency, and home state affection.

Almost Famous Women by Megan Mayhew Bergman

This collection features stories about fascinating yet under-appreciated women from history, many with ties to more famous literary men, including Lucia Joyce, daughter of James Joyce, a dancer; Dolly Wilde, Oscar Wilde’s witty and eccentric niece; and Allegra Byron, Lord Byron’s illegitimate daughter who died during childhood. Throughout, Bergman excels at bringing these historical women to life without airbrushing them, allowing them to exist on the page in all their messiness and complexity. Whether writing about the first racially integrated all-female jazz band, The International Sweethearts of Rhythm, or the female survivors of Bergen-Belsen, Bergman renders her characters with honesty and emotional nuance.

I Am Not Jackson Pollock by John Haskell

Another debut collection, Haskell’s I Am Not Jackson Pollock, offers an intensely psychological, philosophically rich look at the larger-than-life characters who populate our movies and mythologies, such as Jackson Pollock, Janet Leigh, Orson Welles, and Joan of Arc. In many of the stories, Haskell weaves together disparate vignettes, building subtle associational tensions and resonances. In “Elephant Feelings,” for example, he deftly shifts between threads about the elephant Topsy (again!), whose electrocution was filmed by Thomas Edison; Saartjie Baartman, an enslaved African woman exhibited across Europe as the Hottentot Venus; and Ganesha, the elephant-headed Hindu god. A former actor and performance artist, Haskell is at his best portraying characters losing themselves in their roles and struggling to reconcile themselves with their personas.

I Am the Brother of XX by Fleur Jaeggy, Trans. by Gini Alhadeff

Translated from Italian by Gini Alhadeff, I Am the Brother of XX includes twenty-one haunting and geographically diverse short stories peppered with fictionalizations of well-known writers, scientists, and saints. Rendered in Jaeggy’s beautifully compact prose, these very brief fictions, most only a few pages long, feature isolated characters contemplating voids, nothingness, and silence. In “Negde,” the poet and essayist Joseph Brodsky takes an evening walk to the Brooklyn Heights Promenade, looking across the East River to where the Twin Towers once stood. In “An Encounter in the Bronx,” an unnamed narrator dining with the neurologist Oliver Sacks obsessively fixates on one of the fish in the restaurant’s aquarium who will subsequently be cooked and served to customers. The Austrian poet and author Ingeborg Bachmann also makes several appearances throughout, even entertaining the writer Italo Calvino at her rented Tuscan vacation home in the collection’s final story.

Wild Nights! by Joyce Carol Oates

Years before Oates wrote Blonde, her magnum opus novel about Marilyn Monroe, she had already begun mixing fact and fiction in these five short stories about the final days (or afterlives) of Edgar Allen Poe, Emily Dickinson, Mark Twain, Henry James, and Ernest Hemingway. In each expertly crafted tale, Oates’s literary icons are brought down to earth, unable to escape their corporal frailties and vulnerabilities. Dickinson, revived as a robot, is sexually assaulted; Hemingway, no longer young or vigorous, confronts an ailing mind and body; and an elderly James, volunteering at a hospital for wounded soldiers, realizes he can no longer hide his erotic desires. Even more impressively, Oates evokes the distinct prose styles of her subjects, from Poe’s exuberant exclamations to Hemingway’s terse minimalism.