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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 bookβs opening story, βThe Bridge,β a new sheriff must confront a suicide epidemic as well as his own deteriorating mental health. In βClassmates,β 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 βA Map of the Forbidden,β about a straight-laced man who is tempted to cheat on his wife after his adulterous father dies, and βThe Boy behind the Tree,β about a problematic father-son relationship made more so by the arrival on the scene of a young man the sonβs age. In βI Return,β 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.
 Media BuzzDiane Rehm Show - NPR - December 27, 2012
Diane Rehm Show - NPR - December 11, 2012
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