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University of Notre Dame Press
August 2012
On Sale: August 15, 2012
192 pages
ISBN: 0268022313
EAN: 9780268022310
Paperback
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Fiction Family Life
In his latest collection of literary fiction, Mark Brazaitis
evokes with sympathy, insight, and humor the lives of
characters in a small Ohio town. The ten short stories of
The Incurables limn the mental landscape of people facing
conditions they believe are insolvable, from the oppressive
horrors of mental illness to the beguiling and baffling
complexities of romantic and familial love.
In the book’s opening story, “The Bridge,” a new sheriff
must confront a suicide epidemic as well as his own
deteriorating mental health. In “Classmates,” a man sets off
to visit the wife of a classmate who has killed himself. Is
he hoping to write a story about his classmate or to observe
the aftermath of what his own suicide attempt, if
successful, would have been like? In the title story, a
down-on-his-luck porn actor returns to his hometown and
winds up in the mental health ward of the local hospital,
where he meets a captivating woman. Other stories in the
collection include “A Map of the Forbidden,” about a
straight-laced man who is tempted to cheat on his wife after
his adulterous father dies, and “The Boy behind the Tree,”
about a problematic father-son relationship made more so by
the arrival on the scene of a young man the son’s age. In “I
Return,” a father narrates a story from the afterlife,
discovering as he does so that he is not as indispensable to
his family as he had believed.
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