Incurables

<p>In his latest collection of literary fiction Mark Brazaitis evokes with sympathy insight and humor the lives of characters in a small Ohio town. The ten short stories of <i>The Incurables</i> limn the mental landscape of people facing conditions they believe are insolvable from the oppressive horrors of mental illness to the beguiling and baffling complexities of romantic and familial love. </p><p>In the book's opening story The Bridge a new sheriff must confront a suicide epidemic as well as his own deteriorating mental health. In Classmates a man sets off to visit the wife of a classmate who has killed himself. Is he hoping to write a story about his classmate or to observe the aftermath of what his own suicide attempt if successful would have been like? In the title story a down-on-his-luck porn actor returns to his hometown and winds up in the mental health ward of the local hospital where he meets a captivating woman. Other stories in the collection include A Map of the Forbidden about a straight-laced man who is tempted to cheat on his wife after his adulterous father dies and The Boy behind the Tree about a problematic father-son relationship made more so by the arrival on the scene of a young man the son's age. In I Return a father narrates a story from the afterlife discovering as he does so that he is not as indispensable to his family as he had believed.</p>