A Little Story about Maurice Ravel

A Little Story about Maurice Ravel (Volume 65, 2015) is the only book Conger Beasley Jr. published with JEF, and it arrived the year before his death. In it the French composer Maurice Ravel is reduced to doll size and stranded on the way to a Spain he has never seen.

Beasley displays genuine affection for the historical Ravel, but immerses him in a humorous fictional milieu in the line of E. B. White's Stuart Little, Mary Norton's The Borrowers, and Walter de la Mare's Memoirs of a Midget — the tiny-protagonist tradition where the small scale of the body becomes the engine of the plot.

Beasley (1940 to 2016) was better known for award-winning literary nonfiction of the American West. We Are a People of This World, on the Lakota Sioux and the massacre at Wounded Knee, won the 1995 Western Writers of America Spur Award for Nonfiction; Sundancers and River Demons won the 1991 Thorpe Menn Award. Across four decades he published roughly nineteen books, and the prize that carries his name, the Conger Beasley Jr. Award for Nonfiction, is still awarded each year.

This is the playful end of that body of work, the fiction rather than the field notes.