The Affliction: A Novel in Stories

by C. Dale Young

Overview

A novel told in short stories, The Affliction is an astounding fiction debut by an award-winning poet full of memorable characters across America and the Caribbean. Young beautifully weaves together the elaborate stories of many while holding together a clear focus: people are not always as they seem.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781945588068
Publisher:	Four Way Books
Publication date:	03/06/2018
Pages:	154
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.60(d)

About the Author

C. DALE YOUNG practices medicine and teaches in the Warren Wilson College MFA Program for Writers. The author of four poetry collections, most recently The Halo (Four Way Books 2016), this is his first novel. He has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, and the Rockefeller Foundation. He lives in San Francisco.

What People are Saying About This

Charles Baxter

“...These tales …like the stories of Julio Cortázar…remind us of how varied and unpredictable short stories, like the world itself, can be.”

Laura van den Berg

“...exhilarating…”

Editorial Reviews

04/23/2018
In Young’s intriguing debut, memorable protagonists are introduced in individual stories before their worlds converge. In the title story, an otherwise ordinary man named Javier Castillo has the ability to disappear and reappear at will. The knowledge of this is a burden to his friend Ricardo, who tries to tell others about Javier’s talent but is never believed. A different kind of invisibility afflicts Leenck in “The Experiment”: an entire town lives under a kind of pall of impending doom, more debilitating for its lack of specificity. For his part, young Leenck—without logical explanation—expects to be felled by his father’s axe at any moment. “Inside the Great House” documents the life of “crazy old Cassie,” who starts as a nun but ultimately communes with the devil. “The Fortunate” follows the elderly Flora Diaz, who is a bit of a mystic and a figure of some authority to her neighbor Rosa, who becomes obsessively dependent on Flora’s perceived psychic gifts. People and things in Rosa’s world appear or disappear, without seeming logic. Significantly, near the end of “The Experiment,” there is a passing reference to Ricardo. In the subsequent six stories, there’s more overlap of characters, more drama, and more manifestations of the affliction (though it’s never explained), giving the whole volume the feel of a set of nesting dolls. Young’s opacity can sometimes frustrate, but he consistently creates an effectively menacing mood, uniting all the strange stories in a satisfying manner. (Mar.)

Publishers Weekly

A heartfelt and well-crafted work.” —Library Journal

From the Publisher

03/01/2018
Full-time physician Young has won numerous fellowships for his poetry, compiled most recently in 2016's The Halo. Here he turns to fiction, demonstrating the easy grace that defines his verse. (He has published short stories but offers a book-length work for the first time.) Capturing a community, these linked stories open with "The Affliction," which details Javier Castillo's astonishing ability to disappear and reappear at will. It seems like such a gift—he "could travel around the world like air itself"—but to the story's narrator, it starts becoming tiresome. And of course being invisible, like so many people in marginalized communities, is as disquieting as being among the "disappeared" of Latin American history. Elsewhere, Rosa hears a terrible prediction from the fortune teller; Old Cassie, once a nun, inherits a great estate and terrorizes her neighbors; and Leenck, who bandaged an injured leg too tightly, nearly has it amputated but is freed by a swift machete stroke from his standoffish father. VERDICT A heartfelt and well-crafted work.

Library Journal