Archive for the ‘Short Stories’ Category

Chris Adrian is big in America. As a result of his three novels and a collection of short stories, The New Yorker has named him as one of their prestigious “20 under 40″.

Now, in an attempt to “crash-land him on to the British literary scene”, two of his books are being published simultaneously in the UK: A Better Angel, which contains nine of his short stories, and a novel called The Great Night, a work of magic realism based on A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

One key to understanding Adrian’s work (The New York Times’s reviewer of The Great Night admitted to feeling “unsure of what has just happened … and why”) is to consider it through a biographical lens. Adrian is a Fellow in Paediatric Haematology-Oncology in San Francisco. He is also a theologian, having studied at Harvard Divinity School. This gives him, as he told The Paris Review recently, “some way to think about the suffering of children that does not make you want to kill yourself”. Accordingly, his writing is almost exclusively concerned with hospitals, dying children, corporeality and existential sorrow, counterpointed with the supernatural and fabulous. The result is a beguiling, troubling and undeniably potent brand of fiction.

Continue reading on the Independent website