In this Book
- Indentations and Other Stories
- Book
- 1990
- Published by: NYU Press
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 letterwhich 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.
Table of Contents
- Indentation
- pp. 1-18
- The Perils of Asthma
- pp. 19-66
- Radiator Dreams
- pp. 67-90
- Mediacrity
- pp. 109-112
- That Thin Line
- pp. 113-122
- A Different letter
- pp. 123-140
- Wide Arcs and S Curves
- pp. 141-170
- Good for Running to the Ends Of
- pp. 171-172