Heretical Songs is a book of historical fictions written by an author with an admitted aversion to historical fact. The first two stories in this collection, "Mahler's Last Symphony" and "The Poet's Sister" play on rumors about the domestic lives of Gustav Mahler and William Wordsworth. Mr. White toys with the thought of Alma Mahler's infidelities and Dorothy Wordsworth's incestuous rage. In the next two stories, "Rossetti's...