ADRIAN_Chris_EN

Idea of Healing and Medicine Poetically and Broadly: From Doctors to Mental Health to Self-Healing in a Non-Medical Way Sunday October 14th 2012 / Power House Arena

The Author

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Chris Adrian was born in Washington D.C. A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, he attended Harvard Divinity School, and is currently a pediatric fellow at UCSF. He received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2009. In 2010, he was chosen as one of the 20 best writers under 40 by The New Yorker.

A Better Angel: Stories (Picador, 2009 ; 2nd ed. Granta Books, 2012)

Bibliography The Great Night: A Novel (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011) A Better Angel: Stories (Picador, 2009 ; 2nd ed. Granta Books, 2012) The Children’s Hospital (Grove Press, 2007) Gob’s Grief: A Novel (Broadway, 2001)

In this inventive collection of stories, Chris Adrian treads the terrain of human suffering-illness, regret, mourning, sympathy--in the most unusual ways. A bereaved twin starts a friendship with a homicidal fifth grader in the hope that she can somehow lead him back to his dead brother. A boy tries to contact the spirit of his dead father and finds himself talking to the Devil instead. A ne’er-do-well pediatrician returns home to take care of his dying father, all the while under the scrutiny of an easily-disappointed heavenly agent. With A Better Angel’s cast of living and dead characters, at once otherworldly and painfully human, Adrian has created a haunting work of spectral beauty and wit.

The Press

© Gus Eliot

Chris Adrian United States

"The author of Gob’s Grief and The Children’s Hospital returns with a sublime collection of nine stories whose wide assortment of characters, many of them children, fugue around death, are plagued by remembrance of things past and are possessed by violence. In Stab, a young protagonist whose twin died, joins a little girl in a killing spree of neighborhood animals, eventually setting their sights on larger prey. A woman who tries to commit suicide in The Sum of Our Parts wanders hospital halls as an astral projection, witnessing the unexpressed desires of her friends in pathology. And a Juno-esque teen, a hospital regular with short-gut syndrome, writes an animal book of sublimated child-ward life: bunnies with high colonic ruin, cats with leukemic indecisiveness and monkeys with chronic kidney doom. The story Why Antichrist? gives us two teenagers who have each lost parents, one to 9/11 (which looms large in the collection); the devil is soon literally between the teens. With heartbreaking imagination, Adrian illuminates how people act out their grief on their own bodies and the bodies of others, and enter the world of the spirit in the process."

"As he did in The Children’s Hospital (2006), Adrian again toes a unique line between fiction writer and prophet. If that staggering novel was a diamond in the rough, these short stories can be seen as the chips and shards left by a craftsman working to uncover the full range of his prodigious skill. He returns to the themes (sickness, childhood, and revelation) that have served him so well thus far in his career—no surprise for a man who is, in addition to being a writer, a divinity student and a pediatrician.

Physical and mental maladies stand in for larger ailments of the soul, and religious trappings—angels and demons, visions and possession—are beatific and horrific at the same time, impossible to untangle one from the other. Each work in this collection helps solidify Adrian’s position as one of the most exciting, inventive writers working today. The moment you feel as if you’ve discovered the meaning in his words, it slips between your fingers and leaves you unsettled, unmoored, and unmistakably impressed."

Ian Chipman, Booklist

Publishers Weekly

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The Great Night: A Novel (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011)

Acclaimed as a “gifted, courageous writer” (The New York Times), Chris Adrian brings all his extraordinary talents to bear in The Great Night— a brilliant and mesmerizing retelling of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

On Midsummer Eve 2008, three people, each on the run from a failed relationship, become trapped in San Francisco’s Buena Vista Park, the secret home of Titania, Oberon, and their court.

On this night, something awful is happening in the faerie kingdom: in a fit of sadness over the end of her marriage, which broke up in the wake of the death of her adopted son, Titania has set loose an ancient menace, and the chaos that ensues will threaten the lives of immortals and mortals alike.

Selected by The New Yorker as one the best young writers in America, Adrian has created a singularly playful, heartbreaking, and humorous novel—a story that charts the borders between reality and dreams, love and magic, and mortality and immortality.

The Children’s Hospital (Grove Press, 2007)

Gob’s Grief: A Novel (Broadway, 2001)

Hailed by the San Francisco Chronicle as “one of the most revelatory novels in recent memory . . . Cleverly conceived and executed brilliantly,” The Children’s Hospital is the story of a hospital preserved, afloat, after the Earth is flooded beneath seven miles of water, and a young medical student who finds herself gifted with strange powers and a frightening destiny.

Jemma Claflin is a third-year medical student at the unnamed hospital that is the only thing to survive after an apocalyptic storm. Inside the hospital, beds are filled with children with the most rare and complicated childhood diseases—a sort of new-age Noah’s Ark, a hospital filled with two of each kind of sickness. As Jemma and her fellow doctors attempt to make sense of what has happened to the world, and try to find the meaning of their futures, Jemma becomes a Moses figure, empowered with the mysterious ability to heal the sick by way of a green fire that shoots from her belly. Simultaneously epic and intimate, wildly imaginative and unexpectedly relevant, The Children’s Hospital is a work of stunning scope, mesmerizing detail, and wrenching emotion.

In the summer of 1863, Gob and Tomo Woodhull, elevenyear-old twin sons of Victoria Woodhull, agree to together forsake their home and family in Licking County, Ohio, for the glories of the Union Army. But on the night of their departure for the war, Gob suffers a change of heart, and Tomo is forced to leave his brother behind. Tomo falls in as a bugler with the Ninth Ohio Volunteers and briefly revels in camp life; but when he is shot clean through the eye in his very first battle, Gob is left to endure the guilt and grief that will later come to fuel his obsession with building a vast machine that will bring Tomo–indeed, all the Civil War dead–back to life.

Epic in scope yet emotionally intimate, Gob’s Grief creates a world both fantastic and familiar and populates it with characters who breath on the page, capturing the spirit of a fevered nation populated with lost brothers and lost souls.

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