by Nathan Holmes

Mark Brazaitis’s short story collection The Incurables has won another award—this time, the Devil’s Kitchen Reading Award in Prose, sponsored by Grassroots, the literary magazine of Southern Illinois University Carbondale. The award is given each year to published works—a book of prose and a book of poetry. As this year’s prose winner, Mark will participate as a panelist at the Devil’s Kitchen Fall Literary Festival, held at SIUC, where he will read from his collection on October 17th.

The Incurables came out in August of last year via University of Notre Dame Press. Since its release, the collection has been recognized as a finalist for the ForeWord Book of the Year Award, featured on The Diane Rehm Show, and has won the Richard Sullivan Prize in Short Fiction. Which is to say, this book has been widely recognized by readers, judges, and critics as an impressive collection.

I won’t go on too long about the merits of these stories, but I particularly enjoyed the sense of cohesion I felt when reading this collection. Many of the stories are subtly connected, and not just in terms of the much-discussed setting or theme—characters even sometimes make appearances in more than one story. I really enjoyed this aspect, and it reveals the way in which the stories have been carefully arranged.

It’s difficult to say which stories are my favorite, but I’m leaning toward “The Bridge,” “This Man, This Woman, This Child, This Town,” and the title story, “The Incurables.” I found these stories to be particularly gripping and memorable. I often find that short story collections sometimes offer only two or three really strong stories, and the others become overshadowed by those heavy hitters. But this is not the case with The Incurables, in which every story hits hard and has that effect where you have to rest the book in your lap for a moment to digest everything before moving on to the next story.

Needless to say, I highly recommend the collection, especially for aspiring writers, and doubly for writers in our MFA program! I’m glad to have the opportunity to learn from Mark as a professor, and to have access to these stories from somewhat of an insider’s perspective. Read more about The Incurables and Mark’s forthcoming novel, Julia & Rodrigo, here. Also check out this interview, in which Mark discusses his stories and his writing with a recent alumni of the MFA program.