Best Seller
Sickness, Health
Paperback
$23.00
Available on Apr 27, 2027 | 256 Pages
From the critically acclaimed author of Offseason comes a wildly brilliant debut story collection with a sick sense of humor and a deep respect for the eccentric.
A thirteen-year-old girl falls in love with her dentist; an adult woman moves back home and must share a bedroom with her father; two friends reconnect and visit their disgraced high school teacher. The familiar world is twisted inside out in Avigayl Sharp’s mischievous, stylish, and beautifully bizarre collection, Sickness, Health.
Across these eleven stories we follow characters whose demented longings for love and approval only untether them further from so-called “real life.” As constrained by the body as they are by the mind, hysterically attuned to the obscenities of the 21st century, they suffer from arrested development and countless physical ailments as they’re forced, time and again, to return to the site of their undoing—where, if they’re lucky, they might catch a glimpse of salvation.
Mercilessly funny, gleefully perverse, Sickness, Health is an existential missive from an unwell world and a cure for the soul rot that ails us.
A thirteen-year-old girl falls in love with her dentist; an adult woman moves back home and must share a bedroom with her father; two friends reconnect and visit their disgraced high school teacher. The familiar world is twisted inside out in Avigayl Sharp’s mischievous, stylish, and beautifully bizarre collection, Sickness, Health.
Across these eleven stories we follow characters whose demented longings for love and approval only untether them further from so-called “real life.” As constrained by the body as they are by the mind, hysterically attuned to the obscenities of the 21st century, they suffer from arrested development and countless physical ailments as they’re forced, time and again, to return to the site of their undoing—where, if they’re lucky, they might catch a glimpse of salvation.
Mercilessly funny, gleefully perverse, Sickness, Health is an existential missive from an unwell world and a cure for the soul rot that ails us.
Author
Avigayl Sharp
Avigayl Sharp is a writer from Chicago. Her fiction has appeared in The Paris Review, Granta, New England Review, and other publications, and has received support from Yaddo, the Granum Foundation, and the Desperate Literature Short Fiction Prize. She was the winner of the 2023 DISQUIET Literary Prize and a 2023–2024 writing fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. Avigayl received her BA from Wesleyan University and her MFA from the Michener Center for Writers in Austin, Texas, where she was the fiction editor of Bat City Review. She is an assistant editor at American Short Fiction.
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