A rich and varied set of ailment-related works.
A collection of stories and essays about illness and caregiving.
As someone who’s studied both medical science and literature, editor Sasson had an interest in how people cope both with their own health issues and with treating or caring for others, and she put out a call for stories on those themes. After receiving a flood of submissions—both factual and fictional, from around the world—she realized that “these were vital stories that demanded to be told.” In these works, more than 20 writers tell stories from the points of view of family members, health care professionals, or patients. Some relate the smallest of victories during years of treatments, while others focus on rare and harrowing medical interventions, such as Ann Calandro’s terrifying description of doctors drilling into a skull in “The Halo.” There’s also the slow, painful realization of how a diagnosis can upend one’s life, as in Peter Mitchell’s haunting story of HIV, “Call of the Crow.” The grueling duties of doctors and nurses are represented in stories such as Rukayatu Ibrahim’s “We Do What We Can,” set at a hospital in Ghana, and Steve Cushman’s “Fracture City,” depicting a fleeting moment of reprieve from an emergency room. The tone varies greatly from writer to writer—D.E.L.’s “Win a Date With John Mayer!” for example, manages to offer welcome black humor in a story of a psychotic break at Starbucks—and Sasson presents stories about a wide, inclusive range of mental and physical ailments along with a helpful index that sorts the works based on diagnoses. A common element of all the works is how they highlight the difficulty of going about one’s everyday life, despite trauma. “You go home. You take the drug. When you wake up, you feel all smeared inside,” Vanessa McClelland writes in the standout story “Fuddle,” which deftly encapsulates the frustration, exhaustion, and perseverance that runs through the whole collection.
A rich and varied set of ailment-related works.Pub Date: March 30, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-92-254254-0
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Moshpit Publishing
Review Posted Online: Aug. 14, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
The range and virtuosity of these stories make this Mosley’s most adventurous and, maybe, best book.
A grandmaster of the hard-boiled crime genre shifts gears to spin bittersweet and, at times, bizarre tales about bruised, sensitive souls in love and trouble.
In one of the 17 stories that make up this collection, a supporting character says: “People are so afraid of dying that they don’t even live the little bit of life they have.” She casually drops this gnomic observation as a way of breaking down a lead character’s resistance to smoking a cigarette. But her aphorism could apply to almost all the eponymous awkward Black men examined with dry wit and deep empathy by the versatile and prolific Mosley, who takes one of his occasional departures from detective fiction to illuminate the many ways Black men confound society’s expectations and even perplex themselves. There is, for instance, Rufus Coombs, the mailroom messenger in “Pet Fly,” who connects more easily with household pests than he does with the women who work in his building. Or Albert Roundhouse, of “Almost Alyce,” who loses the love of his life and falls into a welter of alcohol, vagrancy, and, ultimately, enlightenment. Perhaps most alienated of all is Michael Trey in “Between Storms,” who locks himself in his New York City apartment after being traumatized by a major storm and finds himself taken by the outside world as a prophet—not of doom, but, maybe, peace? Not all these awkward types are hapless or benign: The short, shy surgeon in “Cut, Cut, Cut” turns out to be something like a mad scientist out of H.G. Wells while “Showdown on the Hudson” is a saga about an authentic Black cowboy from Texas who’s not exactly a perfect fit for New York City but is soon compelled to do the right thing, Western-style. The tough-minded and tenderly observant Mosley style remains constant throughout these stories even as they display varied approaches from the gothic to the surreal.
The range and virtuosity of these stories make this Mosley’s most adventurous and, maybe, best book.Pub Date: Sept. 15, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-8021-4956-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: Sept. 1, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2020
PERSPECTIVES
It's being called a novel, but it is more a hybrid: short-stories/essays/confessions about the Vietnam War—the subject that O'Brien reasonably comes back to with every book. Some of these stories/memoirs are very good in their starkness and factualness: the title piece, about what a foot soldier actually has on him (weights included) at any given time, lends a palpability that makes the emotional freight (fear, horror, guilt) correspond superbly. Maybe the most moving piece here is "On The Rainy River," about a draftee's ambivalence about going, and how he decided to go: "I would go to war—I would kill and maybe die—because I was embarrassed not to." But so much else is so structurally coy that real effects are muted and disadvantaged: O'Brien is writing a book more about earnestness than about war, and the peekaboos of this isn't really me but of course it truly is serve no true purpose. They make this an annoyingly arty book, hiding more than not behind Hemingwayesque time-signatures and puerile repetitions about war (and memory and everything else, for that matter) being hell and heaven both. A disappointment.
Pub Date: March 28, 1990
ISBN: 0618706410
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: Oct. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1990
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