Coulrophobia & Fata Morgana - Softcover

Appel, Jacob M

4.22

310 ratings by Goodreads

9781625579539: Coulrophobia & Fata Morgana

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1625579535 ISBN 13: 9781625579539

Publisher: Black Lawrence Press, 2016

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In his ninth book and fifth collection of stories, Jacob M. Appel introduces readers to a diplomat's wife who attempts to seduce her chimney sweep through Norwegian lessons, a minister whose dead wife is romantically involved with Greta Garbo, and a landlord menaced by a rent-delinquent mime.

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About the Author:

Jacob M. Appel is a doctor, lawyer, medical bioethicist, and a widely published fiction writer. In addition to THE TOPLESS WIDOW OF HERKIMER STREET (Howling Bird Press, 2016), he has written nine books, including, most recently, MIRACLES AND CONUNDRUMS OF THE SECONDARY PLANET (Black Lawrence Press, 2015). His first novel, The Man Who Wouldn't Stand Up, won the Dundee International Book Award in 2012. His short story collection SCOUTING FOR THE REAPER (Black Lawrence Press, 2014) won the 2012 Hudson Prize. He has won the Boston Review Short Fiction Competition, the William Faulkner-William Wisdom Award for the Short Story, the Dana Award, and many other honors. He has published short fiction in more than two hundred literary journals, including Agni, Conjunctions, The Gettysburg Review, Prairie Schooner, The Virginia Quarterly Review, and West Branch. Appel holds graduate degrees from Brown University, where he also taught for many years, Columbia University's College of Physicians and Surgeons, Harvard Law School, New York University's MFA program in fiction, and Albany Medical College's Alden March Institute of Bioethics. A resident of New York, he currently teaches at the Gotham Writer's Workshop and the Mount Sinai School of Medicine.

Review:

In these ten clear-eyed fictions, Appel explores the tensions between sisters and lovers, grandparents and grandchildren, butchers and vegetarians, idealists and pragmatists, the vocal and the silent, the living and the dead. His work suggests the wry humor of Grace Paley, the linguistic joy of Stanly Elkin, and the psychic violence of Flannery O'Connor. In short, Appel delivers the full experience, squeezing every possible nuance out of the form.--Trudy Lewis, author of The Empire Rolls.

The writer Jacob Appel writes confidently about what he knows. He draws from his experience in medicine and the law to create arresting stories that combine the eerie and the corporeal. Then we have manslaughter, murder and envy. The characters are not people you meet every day. Plucked from the imagination of the writer, they attempt to force behavior with varying results. Coulrophobia and Fata Morgana, the multi-word title of Appel's latest book features the superior mirage, and like a mirage, the stories within reflect a distorted and sometimes unrecognizable reality. --Edith Pearlman, author of Honeydew.

Jacob Appel's narratives pull you in from the first entrance of their characters, whether it's a woman picking up her errant grandson from the police station, or two U.S.-Canadian border guards with too much time to kill. The portraits are sharp and perceptive, with a vivid sense of scene. They can also be quietly devastating, as in the love story "Counting," or bitterly funny, as in "Saluting the Magpie," which is to say that Appel is a writer of versatility and verve. Coulrophobia and Fata Morgana is a collection that renews my faith in storytelling.--David Galef, author of My Date with Neanderthal Woman.

My admiration for Jacob Appel increases with each page I read. He's an ingenious storyteller. He's also witty and large-hearted and graceful with a sentence. Coulrophobia & Fata Morgana brims with distinctive characters: Mimes and butchers, rabbis and diva, all of them seeking love and understanding with a zest all their own. This is the finest comic prose I've read in a very long time.--Alyson Hagy, author of Boleto.

There's a great forward-leaning energy to the stories of Jacob Appel. And just like his characters, one finds oneself hooked into situations beyond oneself, each moment new and singular and compelling and strange.--William Lychack, author of The Architect of Flowers.
A Jacob Appel story is like a beautiful room that contains a trap door. Each tale in Coulrophobia and Fata Morgana is somehow ruthlessly observant yet compassionately engaged--and in the end uncannily human. Open the cover and you'll find yourself captivated by these unpredictable characters, the intimate and surprising glimpse of their lives.--Erin Soros, winner of the Commonwealth Prize for the Short Story.
"An excellent writer with an excellent imagination and a wide-ranging curiosity--a rare combination in literary fiction these days....Here are stories about a woman who becomes a kosher butcher in New York City, a desert-bound census taker, a pair of guards at the U.S.-Canadian border in Vermont, and a family dealing with coulrophobia (fear of clowns) when a mime rents an apartment from them...."--Joe Ponepinto, Tahoma Literary Review.

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