Oh my god, I have found the modern day, male Flannery O'Connor! Dark, disturbing tone? The grotesque? Religious themes? Check, check, and check. With Adrian though, we have medicine instead of the South.The man is a freaking genius. Seriously, go read his bio - it's insane. I loved every single story in this collection and I can't wait to read The Children's Hospital.

Chris Adrian is fascinating and inexplicable. He's got an MD, completed a pediatric residency, spent time at Harvard Divinity School, graduated from the Iowa Writer's Workshop, is currently working in pediatric hematology/oncology at UCSF, and just last year was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship. Damn. Somehow, during this time, he managed to write one short novel, bizarre and imperfect, one long novel, bizarre and less imperfect, and many stories, most of which are collected here. Dark dark dark

This combines the author's experience as a paediatric clinician (much about illness, stories set in hospitals) with a taste for the afterlife (angels/prophecy) and an obsession with 9/11. In one story a boy 'sees' the forthcoming terrorist attack on the WTC, or rather 'becomes' one of the towers, people falling out of his hair; in another the teenage daughter of a 9/11 victim has sex while footage of the tragedy is projected on to the couple's naked bodies. The whole quite a trip, weird and bloo...

As a lover of short stories, I am forced to maintain a high tolerance for mediocrity to get through to the real gems. Thankfully this book popped up on the New Releases section in my library, because there isn't a clunker among the bunch. The stories, vastly original, are gripping and sometimes devastating pieces from a very individual writer. This collection has a significantly unified tone, almost a subdued desperation blended with a wonderfully enabling innocence. It was rewarding to read it

I read The Children's Hospital (or some of it, anyway) with a book group, and somehow ended up wondering if maybe if I just tried something else of Chris Adrian's... Spoiler: don't. Well, don't if The Children's Hospital totally failed to work for you, anyway. I could've told you it was the same author without looking it up.This review does a more even-handed job of analysing this than I would; suffice it to say that I, for my part, will not read anything else by Chris Adrian.

A collection of stories from writer-doctor Chris Adrian. Reminded me a lot of Denis Johnson's fiction. Lots of surrealistic dream visions and hallucinations. Some of the stories were gruesome, too: murder, body parts that are misshapen and/or perverted into grotesqueries. Adrian's characters are like Holden Caulfield in that they sometimes seem to long for redemption and setting things aright but they harbor a lot of pleasure in just being snarky and sarcastic about the tragedy of how life is. T...

3.5 stars. Haunting and funny. Echoes of 9/11 are strong throughout. By far the best story was "Changeling".

There is definitely some 4-star fiction in this collection, but some of these pieces felt more like (and might be) scenes cut from The Children's Hospital than free-standing, full-bodied stories. (When McSweeney's bought TCH's manuscript, it was 400 pp longer.) In a recent interview, Adrian admits to writing the same story over and over again--and to some extent, I think that's true for most writers; there are those particular questions we can't stop asking and investigating, and it's not like w...

Recommended on Thursday. Bought Thursday night. Read on Sunday, finished on Monday.Done and dusted. A new author to follow.I’m always especially intrigued by books written by physicians, envying them their overachieving capabilities. And look at the author photo on the back flap of the dust jacket. Such boyish good looks, such Mid-West clean-scrubbed open face and twinkling eyes. But his aw-shucks smile looks a bit sheepish. Perhaps because he can almost hear the reader’s disbelieving comment, “...

The characters in these stories are all uniquely and gloriously fucked up, in ways paralleling reality without ever quite being mistaken for real. If that makes sense. We see the Antichrist coming of age, a young girl with an escalating penchant for murder, an epidemic of linked hallucinations among the youth of a particular town, a boy possessed by spirits who only returns to his original self under grim circumstances. Each of these characters is both disturbed and disturbing in its own way, an...

he 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

The best of these stories ("The Changeling", "Stab", and especially "Why Antichrist?") are shocking, memorable, and affective, and even the ones that don't work as well are still quite well-crafted. I had a small issue with the recurrence of the "post-9/11 effects on a character", but even that can't detract much from the power of the book as a whole.

Chris Adrian mixes theology and magic realism to create a unique style that I couldn't put down. I first read his story "Changling" in Esquire where it was originally published as "Promise Breaker" and it blew me away. When I picked up this book I found that it was one of many gems Adrian had produced over the years.

About two years ago, while doing some drunken book shopping with Surya at City Lights Books in North Beach, I stumbled across Chris Adrian's second novel, "The Children's Hospital," and was completely fascinated with the story. A kind of Noah's ark, but with a hospital and set in modern times. I wish I could say that I've completed the book, but I haven't...yet. It's fat and dense and completely interesting.But my ever-changing, ever-adapting taste has moved to reading more short story collectio...

What a strange collection of story, and I enjoyed it so much. The stories are unsettling and imagistic, and if this is what Adrian can do in a compressed space, I look forward to how his language can explode in longer form.

Tremendously touching. The mastery of language is epic.

this collection, like adrian's incredible novel "the children's hospital", mixes the religious impulse with contemporary high-tech medicine to great effect. the author conflates religion and medicine in an attempt, it seems, to understand what either is really about and how they can possibly coexist. over and over again, he puts a traditionally religious theme or occurrence into the realm of medicine and goes about showing how these once sacred or spiritual topics are processed by modern medicin...

I am a big fan of chris adrian's work, and this collection of short stories didn't let me down. Returning to themes and topics he explored in "Gob's Grief" and "The Children's Hospital" such as the violent and graceful management of grief, the death of brothers, the play of the fantastic in the frightening reality of the medical or very real- he doesn't repeat himself, but expands on earlier definitions and understandings, and makes a broader attempt at empathy and compassion for the forces outs...

Chris teaches us a lesson: you are going to die. MEMENTO MORI. It doesn't matter how fast you can run or how many friends you have, death awaits you and being alive is painful. Stories surrounded by sorrow and pain, stories recommend for those who are tired of Mr Wonderful slogans: stories for those out there who are ready to accept that life isn't a fairytale.

Very weird. In a good way. I only didn’t like the second story, The Sum of Our Parts, but even that one had its moments. But I sure don’t want Chris Adrian to be my son’s pediatrician.