Summary | Excerpt | Reviews | Beyond the Book | Read-Alikes | Genres & Themes | Author Bio
Critics' Opinion:
Readers' Opinion:
First Published:
Aug 2008, 240 pages
Paperback:
Jul 2009, 304 pages
Book Reviewed by:
Amy Reading
Buy This Book
This article relates to A Better Angel
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
previous novels are
Gob's Grief and
The Children's Hospital, which share characters with each other
though they are set in different centuries. Some of those characters
recur in A Better Angel, as does the setting of Severna Lake,
Maryland.
…and a pediatrician…
He got a medical degree from Eastern Virginia Medical School and worked as a pediatrician in the ER at Boston Children's Hospital, before leaving for his current stint as a pediatric hematology/oncology fellow in San Francisco. One of Adrian's recurring characters is Doctor Chandra, an insecure, inept doctor whose full name, in some of the stories, can be rearranged to spell Chris Adrian.
…and a divinity student.
He is earning a Masters in Divinity at Harvard Divinity School with plans to pursue a PhD in theology or ethics. Adrian was raised Catholic but calls himself a "lapsed atheist." On his graduate school application, he declined to label himself with a particular denomination, but has said that he leans toward Unitarian Universalist or the United Church of Christ. He gave a decidedly hipsterish sermon at the school about getting a tattoo "as a visible reminder to be a better person," which was subsequently published in the New York Times Magazine.
Need more of a Chris Adrian fix? Read his uncollected short story, "Horse and Horseman", at Zoetrope; and "Promise Breaker", one of the stories collected in A Better Angel.
This "beyond the book article" relates to A Better Angel. It originally ran in September 2008 and has been updated for the
July 2009 paperback edition.
Go to magazine.
The House on Biscayne Bay
by Chanel Cleeton
As death stalks a gothic mansion in Miami, the lives of two women intertwine as the past and present collide.
The Flower Sisters
by Michelle Collins Anderson
From the new Fannie Flagg of the Ozarks, a richly-woven story of family, forgiveness, and reinvention.
The Funeral Cryer by Wenyan Lu
Debut novelist Wenyan Lu brings us this witty yet profound story about one woman's midlife reawakening in contemporary rural China.
Your guide toexceptional books
BookBrowse seeks out and recommends the best in contemporary fiction and nonfiction—books that not only engage and entertain but also deepen our understanding of ourselves and the world around us.
