Natural Shocks: A Novel
Dec 2014 · Open Road Media
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255
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About this ebook
A high-flying journalist comes to ground in this brilliant and bittersweet novel about coming to terms with the traumas of life
Fred Wursup has an enviable existence. Paid to travel around the world “harvesting the annual crop of stars and villains,” he has a beautiful geophysicist girlfriend and a friendly relationship with his ex-wife, Susannah, whose living room he can see into from the roof of his Lexington Avenue apartment. His latest book, a collective portrait of brilliant but flawed leaders called Down the American Drain, had the good fortune to be published at the height of the Watergate scandal, sending it to the top of the bestseller lists.
A new assignment, however, threatens to bring an end to Wursup’s recent string of successes. Asked to write an article on dying—still “undiscovered country,” according to his editor—he becomes unsettled by the seemingly random course of his life, the nature of his work, and the mortality that surrounds him. A troubled playwright he once profiled commits suicide. His elderly father, a retired meter reader who writes poetry about the last years of famous old men, seems to be on the verge of something drastic. Cicia, a young woman dying of cancer at St. Vincent’s Hospital, is gorgeous, vibrant, and doomed, and Wursup just might be falling in love with her.
A charming and richly intelligent story about the disasters, major and minor, that are bound to happen to us all, Natural Shocks showcases the fine craftsmanship and depth of feeling that have established Richard Stern as one of America’s most admired authors.
Fred Wursup has an enviable existence. Paid to travel around the world “harvesting the annual crop of stars and villains,” he has a beautiful geophysicist girlfriend and a friendly relationship with his ex-wife, Susannah, whose living room he can see into from the roof of his Lexington Avenue apartment. His latest book, a collective portrait of brilliant but flawed leaders called Down the American Drain, had the good fortune to be published at the height of the Watergate scandal, sending it to the top of the bestseller lists.
A new assignment, however, threatens to bring an end to Wursup’s recent string of successes. Asked to write an article on dying—still “undiscovered country,” according to his editor—he becomes unsettled by the seemingly random course of his life, the nature of his work, and the mortality that surrounds him. A troubled playwright he once profiled commits suicide. His elderly father, a retired meter reader who writes poetry about the last years of famous old men, seems to be on the verge of something drastic. Cicia, a young woman dying of cancer at St. Vincent’s Hospital, is gorgeous, vibrant, and doomed, and Wursup just might be falling in love with her.
A charming and richly intelligent story about the disasters, major and minor, that are bound to happen to us all, Natural Shocks showcases the fine craftsmanship and depth of feeling that have established Richard Stern as one of America’s most admired authors.
About the author
Richard Stern (1928–2013) was the acclaimed author of more than twenty works of fiction and nonfiction, including the novels Other Men’s Daughters, Golk, Stitch, and Natural Shocks. Born in New York City, he attended the University of North Carolina and received his master’s degree from Harvard University and his PhD from the University of Iowa. The recipient of many honors, including the Award of Merit for the Novel, given once every six years by the American Academy of Arts and Letters, Stern was a longtime professor of English at the University of Chicago, where he taught alongside Saul Bellow. He counted Flannery O’Connor, Norman Mailer, Anthony Burgess, Lillian Hellman, John Cheever, John Berryman, and Philip Roth among his many other literary admirers.
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