Content Warning: This section of the guide refers to racism, violence, and trauma in war.

James McBride uses vast histories, which span both time and space, to orient his stories as part of larger trajectories of significance. Miracle at St. Anna, which tells the story of a single month in a small area of countryside in Italy in December 1944, travels back in time to 16th-century Florence, tracks 12 centuries of history in the tiny village of Bornacchi, looks at the personal struggles of a French sculptor, and enters private conversations of old Italian men at the end of the 20th century. These stories deal with the large-scale shifting concerns of time while also focusing on the personal; both petty concerns like a duke attempting to impress the chambermaid he has taken as his mistress and global worries like the perniciousness of anti-Black racism have a place in McBride’s sweeping epic.

The result of this is a text that possesses an aura of mythology, adhering to the model built by stories in which individual accounts work towards explaining broader phenomena. McBride thus offers a playful attitude towards his treatment of history, even as he roots his

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