Indentations and Other Stories

By Joe Schall

Indentation and Other Stories is a collection of nine stories ranging from the wildly funny and idiosyncratic to the downright bizarre. The title story features a pathological dentist who seeks a quirky catharsis by decorating his apartment in hygienic dental paraphernalia. Other tales frolic through the lives of characters who border on the delightfully absurd: a woman, after going through menopause, struggles to recreate her menstrual periods by altering her diet; a former New York street reporter, fired because of his "ideals," aspires to become a credible street person and decides, tentatively, to have a religious experience; an English major turned psychologist writes a pseudoscientific "article"--complete with footnotes and a University of New Jersey cover letter--which argues, by example, for the use of figurative language in scientific journal writing. Other stories are more humanizing: "The Perils of Asthma" is a sympathetic lok at a twelve-year-old boy struggling to grow up amidst his perplexing asthma, his eccentric Catholic parents, and his mystifying quasi-erections. All of the stories are grounded in the allure of language, the luxuriance of detail, and the celebration of human compulsion and obsession.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0814779174
• ISBN13: 9780814779170
• Release Date: December 1990
• Publisher: New York University Press
• Length: 182 Pages
• Weight: 0.91 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 6.0" x 9.0"