Review
Chris Adrian writes piercing, astonishing, deeply serious stories
that sound utterly ridiculous if you only describe their plots. His second
novel,
The Children's Hospital, one of the best novels I've read in the
last five years, is about a hospital that turns into an ark during an
apocalyptic flood and bears its inhabitants towards a new land. How corny is
that? Yet Adrian pulls it off because, though his conviction in his own
fictional world never wavers, he persistently undercuts the ponderousness of his
symbolism with irreverence, and the combination comes off sounding a lot like
wisdom.
Adrian's literary terrain is best categorized as magical realism, in which none
of his characters are surprised when supernatural happenings overtake their
otherwise recognizable world. One story features an angel who begs her human
host to take another hit...
Beyond the Book
Chris Adrian may write about angels, but the man himself is a superhero.
He is a novelist…
He graduated with an MFA from the prestigious Iowa Writers' Workshop
after completing a Bachelors degree in English at the University of
Florida. Mark Sarvas, a novelist and literary critic who blogs at The
Elegant Variation, remembers being an undergraduate at the University of
Iowa when Adrian was a graduate student. Word would get around whenever
Adrian was workshopping one of his stories, and the undergrads would
sneak into the grad student office to steal the photocopies. His...
