Cover art by Andrea Wan

PEN/robert w. Bingham award for debut fiction, FINALIST, 2017

Young lions fiction award, New York Public library, FINALIST, 2017

Shirley jackson Award, NOMINEE for single-author collection, 2017

“A richly imagined and impeccably crafted debut.”
—Kirkus, Starred Review, Best debut fiction of 2016

“Stories as well executed as these are their own reward, but it’s also clear from the capaciousness on display here that Ms. Beams has novels’ worth of worlds inside her.”
—New York Times

“This debut collection is full of promise and surreal delight. In the shocking title tale, a teacher falls to pieces in front of her class, not emotionally or metaphorically, but literally. We hope there's much more to come from this writer.”
—O, The Oprah Magazine

“These stories are at once spooky and lush, eerie and deeply felt, ghostly but also vibrantly alive. Clare Beams is a magician, and each of these stories is a muscular, artful haunting.”
—Caitlin Horrocks, author of This Is Not Your City

“In gorgeous prose that thrills, instructs, and thoroughly inspires, Clare Beams obliterates the ‘dividing line between possibilities and impossibilities,’ showing how our passions can rule with reality-bending magic.”
—chang-rae lee, author of On Such a Full Sea

“Clare Beams’s invigorating stories are brave, inventive, lyrical, and just a little bit nasty. Read them now.”
—Sam lipsYte, author of The Fun Parts

 “an elegant and assured debut, packed with confident prose—and stories with novel-like wholeness in the way of munro and cheever…smart, savage, and compulsively readable.”
—megan mayhew bergman, author of almost famous women

The literary, historic, and fantastic collide in these wise and exquisitely unsettling stories. From bewildering assemblies in school auditoriums to the murky waters of a Depression-era health resort, Beams’s landscapes are tinged with otherworldliness, and her characters’ desires stretch the limits of reality.

Ingénues at a boarding school bind themselves to their headmaster’s vision of perfection; a nineteenth-century landscape architect embarks on his first major project, but finds the terrain of class and power intractable; a bride glimpses her husband’s past when she wears his World War II parachute as a gown; and a teacher comes undone in front of her astonished fifth graders.

As they capture the strangeness of being human, the stories in We Show What We Have Learned reveal Clare Beams’s rare and capacious imagination—and yet they are grounded in emotional complexity, illuminating the ways we attempt to transform ourselves, our surroundings, and each other.