Indentation and Other Stories is a collection of nine stories ranging from the wildly funny and idiosyncratic to the downright bizarre. The title story features a pathological dentist who seeks a quirky catharsis by decorating his apartment in hygienic dental paraphernalia. Other tales frolic through the lives of characters who border on the delightfully absurd: a woman, after going through menopause, struggles to recreate her menstrual periods by altering her diet; a former New York street reporter, fired because of his «ideals,» aspires to become a credible street person and decides, tentatively, to have a religious experience; an English major turned psychologist writes a pseudoscientific «article»—complete with footnotes and a University of New Jersey cover letter—which argues, by example, for the use of figurative language in scientific journal writing. Other stories are more humanizing: «The Perils of Asthma» is a sympathetic lok at a twelve-year-old boy struggling to grow up amidst his perplexing asthma, his eccentric Catholic parents, and his mystifying quasi-erections. All of the stories are grounded in the allure of language, the luxuriance of detail, and the celebration of human compulsion and obsession.
Оглавление
Joe Schall. Indentations and Other Stories
INDENTATION AND OTHER STORIES
CONTENTS
INDENTATION
THE PERILS OF ASTHMA. 1. A Finch Named Goldy
2. No Sheetin Way
3. They’re All Odd Numbers
4. The Ground Blossoms
5. The Talking Screen
RADIATOR DREAMS
FIGURATIVE LANGUAGE: BRIDGING THE SCIENTIFIC-RHETORICAL-RAT GAP
Established in 1983, the Elmer Holmes Bobst Awards in Arts and Letters are presented each year to individuals who have brought true distinction to the American literary scene. Recipients of the Awards include writers as varied as Toni Morrison, John Updike, Russell Baker, Flora Lewis, Edward Albee, Arthur Miller, and James Merrill. The Awards have now been expanded to include a category devoted to emerging writers of poetry and fiction, and in 1990 the jurors, E. L. Doctorow, Denis Donoghue, Galway Kinnell, and Richard Sennett, selected the first two winners in this category, Bruce Murphy, for his collection of poetry Sing, Sing, Sing and Joe Schall, for his Indentation and Other Stories. These two works are both published by New York University Press.
