Everyone knows someone who's sick or suffering. Yet when a friend or relative is under duress many of us feel uncertain about how to cope. Throughout her recent bout with breast cancer, Letty Cottin Pogrebin became fascinated by her friends' and family's diverse reactions to her and her illness: how awkwardly some of them behaved, how some misspoke or misinterpreted her needs, and how wonderful it was when people read her right. She began talking...

"Stuck in a hospital and heavily medicated, Harry Chapman doesn't just hear the doctors, nurses, and other patients. Is that the voice of his mother, acerbic and disappointed in him as ever? Perhaps her presence would be understandable enough, but what is Pip from Great Expectations doing in his hospital room? More and more voices join the chorus: friends from childhood, lovers, characters from novels and poetry. Slowly, endearingly, the life of Harry...

"Winner of the Center for Fiction's Doheny Prize Mike Scalise hits his stride in this page-turner of a memoir featuring a sudden and strange sequence of medical disasters. From its gripping ruptured-brain-tumor emergency room opening, through a series of medical procedures and oddball doctors, Scalise creates a sharply observed, uproariously funny, and deeply moving account of acromegaly, the hormone disorder best known for causing gigantism. Scalise...