Medical Fiction

A curious book won the Pulitzer Prize, I just heard. It’s called Tinkers What I found most intriguing about the news story is that the book was published by a small specialty publisher — Bellevue Literary Press, which is associated with the Bellevue Hospital in New York City. Probably one of the scrariest hospitals in my imagination. Big, imposing, vaguely Gothic hospitals aren’t cool, as any horror film production designer knows. The floors are inevitably wet and mildewy and the wheels of gurney’s clank from lack of maintenance, which is only the surface of what isn’t maintained.

Anyway, this book is intriguing to me because of the press typically does medical books, which makes sense, but they also publish fiction books that have medical themes — combining fiction with the traditionally very terse, fact-based themes of medical books. Something that sounds kin to design fiction.

Bellevue is a major center for emergency services in New York City, but it is probably best known in the public imagination as a mental hospital. The hospital’s literary press was established five years ago, mainly for the publication of high-end medical books. But Goldman, a veteran of the publishing business, is also committed to releasing works of fiction with a scientific or medical theme.

via NPR

3 thoughts on “Medical Fiction”

  2. Available on Kindle. I'll have to check it out.BTW, if you are in to creepy mental-hospital thrillers, I recently read Shutter Island. Zoiks.

Comments are closed.