Coulrophobia & Fata Morgana: Stories - Softcover

Fiction. Jacob Appel's narratives pull you in from the first entrance of their characters, whether it's a woman picking up her errant grandson from the police station, or two US-Canadian border guards with too much time to kill. The portraits are sharp and perceptive, with a vivid sense of scene. They can also be quietly devastating, as in the love story Counting, or bitterly funny, as in Saluting the Magpie, which is to say that Appel is a writer of versatility and verve. COULROPHOBIA & FATA MORGANA is a collection that renews my faith in storytelling."—David Galef

Jacob M. Appel is a doctor, lawyer, medical bioethicist, and a widely published fiction writer. In addition to THE TOPLESS WIDOW OF HERKIMER STREET (Howling Bird Press, 2016), he has written nine books, including, most recently, MIRACLES AND CONUNDRUMS OF THE SECONDARY PLANET (Black Lawrence Press, 2015). His first novel, The Man Who Wouldn't Stand Up, won the Dundee International Book Award in 2012. His short story collection SCOUTING FOR THE REAPER (Black Lawrence Press, 2014) won the 2012 Hudson Prize. He has won the Boston Review Short Fiction Competition, the William Faulkner-William Wisdom Award for the Short Story, the Dana Award, and many other honors. He has published short fiction in more than two hundred literary journals, including Agni, Conjunctions, The Gettysburg Review, Prairie Schooner, The Virginia Quarterly Review, and West Branch. Appel holds graduate degrees from Brown University, where he also taught for many years, Columbia University's College of Physicians and Surgeons, Harvard Law School, New York University's MFA program in fiction, and Albany Medical College's Alden March Institute of Bioethics. A resident of New York, he currently teaches at the Gotham Writer's Workshop and the Mount Sinai School of Medicine.