Indentations and other stories / Joe Schall.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Schall, Joe, Author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

American fiction.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (184 p.)

Place of Publication:

New York, NY : New York University Press, [1990]

Language Note:

English

Summary:

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.

Contents:

Frontmatter

CONTENTS

Indentation

The Perils of Asthma

Radiator Dreams

Figurative Language. Bridging the Scientific-Rhetorical-Rat Gap

Mediacrity

That Thin Line

A Different Letter

Wide Arcs and S Curves

Good for Running to the Ends Of

Notes:

Description based upon print version of record.

Includes bibliographical references (p. 94-107)

This eBook is made available Open Access under a Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0

Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (publisher's Web site, viewed 23. Jun 2020)

ISBN:

9780814741498

0814741495

9780585318806

0585318808

OCLC:

782877971