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Just as your parents had lives before you came long, so did your favorite authors (though we can’t imagine Edith Wharton doing anything but spending her days anticipating our eventual joy at her cleverness). Author Rachel Cohen, in A Chance Meeting, has taken the liberty of reimagining famous literary encounters. Like any good writer, she takes a dash of reality and enhances. We find ourselves intrigued by the concept almost as much as ashamed that our rather fuzzy notion of history made our jaw drop when we realized that Mark Twain and Ulysses S. Grant were contemporaries. We are pathetic; we admit it.

• The secret history of American literature