" Ship Fever" and Other Stories (Norton Paperback Fiction)

by Andrea Barrett (Author), Andrea Barrett (Author)

• Used

  Paperback
  1996

  $5.29

  The elegant short fictions gathered hereabout the love of science and the science of love are often set against the backdrop of the nineteenth century. Interweaving historical and fictional characters, they encompass both past and present as they negotiate the complex territory of ambition, failure, achievement, and shattered dreams. In Ship Fever, the title novella, a young Canadian doctor finds himself at the center of one of history's most tragic epidemics. In The English Pupil, Linnaeus, in old age, watches as the world he organized within his head slowly drifts beyond his reach. And in The Littoral Zone, two marine biologists wonder whether their life-altering affair finally was worth it. In the tradition of Alice Munro and William Trevor, these exquisitely rendered fictions encompass whole lives in a brief space. As they move between interior and exterior journeys, science is transformed from hard and known fact into malleable, strange and thrilling fictional material (Boston Globe).

• Used

  Paperback
  2000

  $3.24

  Exceptional tales of emancipation and evolution at the birth of the modern era. 'Beautiful stories about the wonder and work of science. The title novella describes the horrors of typhus in the newly arrived Irish immigrants to Quebec, and suggests that, in epidemics, medicine is more a piece of politics than a form of science. In Barrett's hands, science is transformed from hard and known fact into malleable, strange and thrilling fictional material.' Boston Globe 'Many of these stories are set in the late nineteenth century, the adolescence of modern science. Barrett's women are often scoffed at for their love of learning. Some try to use science as a currency with which to buy acceptance in a male-dominated world. But no character relates only to his or her work. Barrett builds her fictions like stones thrown into prose ponds: science is the stone, while human dramas, personal and social, are the concentric rings that radiate beautifully outward.' Newsday