Summary:

An army lieutenant named Klimov is returning home to his sister and aunt in Moscow and falls ill while on the train. His mouth is dry, his brain turns to mush, and he keeps hearing a strange voice cry, "Is the mail ready?" When he finally arrives at the station, he collapses. During the next days or weeks, he thrashes around his bed in delirium, latching onto disconnected images of a cheerful doctor, a grave priest, and various acquaintances and events.

One morning Klimov awakens feeling well. His whole being is filled with a sensation of happiness. He learns from the doctor that he has survived a case of spotted typhus. But where is his sister Katya? His aunt groans, "Ah, Katya, Katya! Our angel is gone! Is gone!" Indeed, Katya had caught typhus from her brother and died. Her funeral had taken place the day before. Pavel's "heart ached, he burst into tears, and leaned his forehead against the window frame."

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Summary:

This quiet little story has two parts. In the first section, the narrator remembers an incident that occurred when he was a high school boy. He was traveling with his grandfather in the Ukraine and they stopped to rest at the home of an Armenian family. The boy was virtually struck dumb by the beauty of the young woman who served them tea. While his grandfather slept, he stood outside in the yard and watched the exquisite young woman do her chores.

In the second section, he remembers an incident from somewhat later, when he was a university student. His train was stopped at a station, and he had gone out to stretch his legs on the platform. He noticed a carelessly dressed young woman, who was standing outside a train window, speaking to one of the passengers.

Once again, he was "suddenly overwhelmed by the feeling I had once experienced in the Armenian village." The narrator also notices the battered and ugly telegraph operator staring at the girl with "a look of tenderness and of the deepest sadness, as though in that girl he saw happiness, his own youth, soberness, purity, wife, children . . . " A bell rang, and the train moved off.

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Summary:

The protagonist of this story is Yakov Ivanov, an ill-tempered old coffin-maker, who hates Jews. Yakov is also a fiddler, but rarely gets to play in the village orchestra because of his antagonism with Rothschild, the flautist. Rothschild is certainly no beauty, a "gaunt, red-haired Jew" with "a perfect network of red and blue veins all over his face."

When Marfa, Yakov's wife of 52 years, becomes ill, Yakov fatalistically builds her coffin in preparation for her death. After she dies, he is "overcome by acute depression." When Rothschild visits him on a friendly errand, Yakov beats up the poor man, yelling, "Get out of my sight!" Afterward, Yakov goes and sits by the river and tries to figure out why he has become the scolding, ill-tempered old man that he is.

Unfortunately, he develops a chill from the exposure. The next day he falls mortally ill with pneumonia. When Rothschild appears at the house again, he is surprised to find Yakov playing the fiddle with tears gushing from his eyes. Later, Yakov tells the priest who has come to confess him, "Give the fiddle to Rothschild."

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Summary:

Lieutenant General von Rabbek hosts a party for members of the regiment in his magnificent home. Of all the attendees, the most awkward is Ryabovitch, "a little officer in spectacles, with sloping shoulders and whiskers like a lynx's." He considers himself the shyest, most undistinguished officer in the whole brigade. While wondering through the mansion, trying to avoid talking to people, he stumbles into a dark room, whereupon a woman rushes up to him, whispering, "At last!" She throws her arms around his neck and kisses him. At once, however, she realizes her mistake, runs from the room, and is lost in the crowd.

Ryabovitch's passion awakes! He feels that his life is beginning anew. For the rest of the evening, he searches in vain for the woman who kissed him. The next day his regiment departs for another area, but some time later, when he returns to the same town, Ryabovitch continues his obsession with the kiss he experienced that night, and still hopes to discover who the woman in the dark room was.

If only he could communicate with General von Rabbek--but no, Rabbek doesn't respond. In the end he stands on the riverbank: "Now that he expected nothing, the incident of the kiss, his impatience, his vague hopes and disappointment, presented themselves in a clear light . . . And the whole world, the whole of life, seemed to Ryabovitch an unintelligible, aimless jest . . . "

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Summary:

Penny (Michele Hicks), working as a prostitute, is called to a room in a seedy hotel where she finds her client is a pair of adult conjoined twins, Blake and Francis Falls (played by identical but not conjoined twins, Mark and Michael Polish, who also co-wrote the screenplay). Shocked, she flees but later returns and, when she learns that one of the twins is ill, calls a doctor friend of hers to examine them. She cares for the twins and they become friends. At Halloween, "the only night of the year they [can pass for] normal," she takes them to a party and then back to her apartment where she and Blake almost make love while Francis, evidently the weaker twin, is sleeping.

She tells her lawyer/pimp about the twins, and he tries to persuade them to sell him their story (which he imagines in terms of separation: "The greatest divorce of all time: not who gets the kid but who gets the kidney . . . "). Offended by her betrayal, they return to their hotel room, and, apparently for the first time, the twins fight. Blake wants to get away from his brother.

The next morning Francis is ill once more, and the twins are hospitalized. Michele visits them and learns that they are dying. Francis's heart is becoming weaker, straining Blake's, and the only way to save Blake will be by separating them. Francis cannot survive separation. Penny tracks down their mother (Lesley Ann Warren), who gave them up for adoption at birth. She visits them in hospital. It emerges that Penny herself has a "retarded" child who is being raised by others. Francis's heart fails, and the twins are taken to the operating room.

Later, Penny tracks Blake down where he is now living alone in the trailer where the twins had lived before, as circus performers. The film ends with Blake, now a man with one arm and one functioning leg, telling Penny that the "story of me is over," but also that stories continue after sad endings. What makes an ending sad, he tells her, is the knowledge that the storyteller is continuing without you.

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Summary:

Mickey, widowed but one year, and his young son, Duncan, drive East from their home in Wyoming, to vacation with Mickey's family on the Jersey shore. As the story develops, the reader learns that Carol, who died from ovarian cancer, was a westerner, and that Mickey is being tempted to return to the east coast with Duncan and reestablish life there.

The two arrive at the vacation cottage very early in the morning; Mickey needs to be with the ocean and what it means to him; Duncan, who has never seen an ocean, rushes to the experience. The child becomes fearful, as he looks at the vast expanse, calls up the idea of sharks, asks if his Mom waits at the "topic" of Cancer for them. The tension develops when Mickey chooses to swim to assuage his own grief, not realizing that his venture terrifies Duncan. The reunion of father and son points to a new understanding of what it means and will mean to each to go forward without Carol.

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Summary:

Told from the perspective of a thirteen-year-old girl, this story about a single mother with two daughters who moves, marries, and dies of breast cancer handles a variety of difficult issues with sensitivity and spunk. A list of those issues--absent father, new stepfather, a thousand-mile move to a new social environment, first menstruation, sibling rivalry, an uncle with incestuous impulses, family secrets, sexual experimentation, cancer, and death--might make it sound like a catalogue of the trials of contemporary suburban young adulthood, but in fact the point of view of Tilden, the main character, keeps the story grounded in very believable, sometimes amusing, often poignant, recognizable truth about what it is to come into awareness of the hard terms of adult life.

The mother's cancer is narrated largely in terms of Tilden's experience of it: secrecy, eventual disclosure, partial information, losses of intimacy, feelings of betrayal, confusion about caregivers' roles, and in the midst of it all, the ordinary preoccupations of early adolescence. The generous and understanding stepfather and neighbors with limited but ready sympathies lighten some of the novel's darker themes.

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Summary:

This historical novel for young adults details the horrors of the Philadelphia Yellow Fever epidemic in 1793 from the point of view of a fourteen-year-old, Mattie, who runs a coffeehouse with her widowed mother and grandfather. In the course of the story, her mother is taken ill, she herself falls ill on the way to the safety of the countryside, and her grandfather dies of heart failure after nursing her. Separated from her mother who is also removed from the city, Mattie finds herself scrabbling for survival in a mostly deserted town after the death of her grandfather, but relocates the free black woman, Eliza, who had worked for her family and who essentially becomes part of her family.

Eventually the mother returns, an invalid but alive, and Eliza and Mattie undertake to run the reopened coffeehouse together and care for Eliza's nephews and an orphaned child Mattie has rescued. Hope reappears with the first frost in the forms of a reopened farmers' market, the return of George Washington to the town, and the reappearance from enforced isolation of Nathaniel Benson, a young painter who gives Mattie a vision of a future life with friendship and love.

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Summary:

The poet contemplates the realities of life in the mining --now ghost--towns of Western America by exploring an old graveyard. "Eighty-nine was bad. At least a hundred / children died," the writer muses while walking among the grave markers. The reader recognizes that this settlement is no longer viable: "The last one buried here: 1938."

After describing the arrangement of the markers and the crude fence that defines the burial ground, he ponders why the graveyard is situated so far from the townsite. In an ironic reflection on the mothers' needs to get on with life after the frequent loss of young ones yet still striving to protect the little graves from greedy excavation, the poet says, " . . . a casual glance / would tell you there could be no silver here."

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Summary:

This thorough and fascinating treatment of the politics of anatomy studies in 19th-century America provides a variety of perspectives on the vexed question of how appropriately to study human anatomy while also maintaining respect for the human body and honoring the various, deeply held community beliefs, and attitudes toward treatment of the dead. Sappol seeks, as he puts it, to "complicate the cultural history of medicine in late-eighteenth- and nineteenth-century America. . . by telling it from an anatomical perspective."

That statement of his objectives hardly suggests the startling range of approaches to the topic he takes in the book's nine chapters. These cover such issues as the legacies of belief about the "personhood" of the dead human body; the status of anatomy as both a legitimate and valuable study and also as an "icon of science"; the relationship of dissection and anatomy study to medical status and professionalization; the political tensions engendered by the "traffic in dead bodies" that most often expropriated corpses from marginalized communities; and the relationship of anatomy studies to sexual commerce and sensationalist fiction.

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