Donald Antrim’s The Emerald Light in the Air (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) is a collection of stories eighteen years in the making. All seven were featured in The New Yorker and five share a prominent relation: at the center is a depressive character trying to make-do. We all have our turn in the barrel, Antrim notes, and sometimes you’re really turned upside down. Stemming from Antrim’s own experience with psychosis, these stories address how to live under the shadow of a disorder most of us refuse to see, and the memory of which dissolves once the depression has lifted.
Read an excerpt from The Emerald Light in the Air.
Banner image courtesy of the John D. & Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.