“Joey, when we began our work with him,” wrote psychiatrist Bruno Bettelheim in 1959, “was a mechanical boy.” Thus began a Scientific American article that is widely regarded as one of the first accounts of autism in popular American media. Bettelheim’s provocative narrative described a delicate 9-year-old boy with an empty gaze who, Bettelheim claimed, had “converted himself into a ‘machine’ b...

Christopher Looby's anthology of queer nineteenth-century American short stories is a fascinating collection both obscure and familiar texts that together constitute powerful argument for the queerness story centrality to literary aesthetics.