"America's most interesting and important essayist." ―Eric Kandel, Nobel Prize–winning author of The Age of Insight
"[Gerald Weissmann] bridges the space between science and the humanities, and particularly between medicine and the muses, with wit, erudition, and, most important, wisdom." ―Adam Gopnik
Embryonic stem cell research. Evolution vs. intelligent design. The transformation of medicine into "health care." Climate change. Never before has science been so intertwined with politics, never have we been more dependent on scientific solutions for the preservation of the species.
Transporting us across more than four hundred years of pivotal moments in science and medicine, Gerald Weissmann distills history's lessons for today's new age of sect and violence: "The Endarkenment." Among others, he lingers with Galileo and his daughter in seventeenth-century Florence, Diderot and d'Alembert in Enlightenment Paris, William and Alice James in fin de siècle Boston, James Watson as the John McEnroe of DNA, and Craig Venter decoding the genome at the dawn of the twenty-first century. Weissmann's message is clear: "Experimental science is our defense―perhaps our best defense―against humbug and the Endarkenment."
Gerald Weissmann (August 7, 1930 – July 10, 2019) was a physician, scientist, editor, and essayist whose collections include The Fevers of Reason: New and Selected Essays; Epigenetics in the Age of Twitter: Pop Culture and Modern Science; Mortal and Immortal DNA: Science and the Lure of Myth; and Galileo’s Gout: Science in an Age of Endarkenment.

Galileo's Gout: Science in an Age of Endarkenment

Literature & Fiction

Weissmann, Gerald

Essays & Correspondence

Bellevue Literary Press

Los Angeles Times Bestseller Mary Cappello[’s] inventive, associative taxonomy of discomfort . . . [is] revelatory indeed.” MARK DOTY, author of Dog Years: A Memoir and Fire to Fire: New and Selected Poems A wonderful, multi-layered piece of writing, with all the insight of great cultural criticism and all the emotional pull of memoir. A fascinating book.” SARAH WATERS, author of The Night Watch and The Little Stranger Without awkwardness we would not know grace, stability, or balance. Yet no one before Mary Cappello has turned such a penetrating gaze on this misunderstood condition. Fearlessly exploring the ambiguous borders of identity, she mines her own life journeysfrom Russia, to Italy, to the far corners of her heart and the depths of a literary or cinematic textto decipher the powerful messages that awkwardness can transmit. Mary Cappello is the author of four books of literary nonfiction, including Awkward: A Detour, which was a Los Angeles Times bestseller, Called Back: My Reply to Cancer, My Return to Life, which won a ForeWord Reviews Book of the Year Award and an Independent Publishers Prize, and Swallow: Foreign Bodies, Their Ingestion, Inspiration, and the Curious Doctor Who Extracted Them. Professor of English at the University of Rhode Island, she lives in Providence, Rhode Island and Lucerne-in-Maine, Maine.

Awkward: A Detour

Biographies & Memoirs

Cappello, Mary

Arts & Literature

“Mark Podwal . . . shake[s] the brain into fresh juxtapositions of understanding.”—Cynthia Ozick
“Mark Podwal’s original drawings . . . reflect his great talent.”—Elie Wiesel
Mark Podwal may be best known for his political drawings on the New York Times op-ed page. Here, he focuses on the human body as a medical specimen, visually representing the essence of the major public health issues of our time. These strangely beautiful images reveal a master’s hand.
 Mark Podwal’s most recent book is Jerusalem Sky (2005); his You Never Know (1998), with Francine Prose, won a National Jewish Book Award. He lives in Harrison, New York.

Doctored Drawings

Comics & Graphic Novels

Comic Strips

“An old-fashioned novel, in the best sense of that phrase, elegantly wrought, hardheaded, and tenderhearted.”—Michael Chabon on A Company of Three
“A first novel that soars.”—The New York Times on Like China
As America emerges from the Depression, the Hatherfords build a comfortable life just outside of New York City, in rural Bergen County, New Jersey. They are a glamorous couple: Vern is the charismatic owner of a successful Ford dealership, and his flamboyant wife Maeve is beautiful even in middle age. When their three-year-old son Scott falls prey to polio, and later, another son must go to war, their marriage slowly implodes. In the midst of it all, twelve-year-old Patsy steals swallows of whiskey and tries to make sense of the world around her, which includes an unusual intimacy between her brother Scott, and Julian, a young African American boy who lives among them.
Neither historical nor medical fiction, The Cure offers the pleasures of both in its richly complex portrayal of the lives and times of its characters. A beautifully written family saga about race, war, childhood illness, and romantic desire, The Cure has at its heart wounding and the struggle for hope.
 Varley O’Connor is the author of A Company of Three (Algonquin, 2003) and Like China (Morrow, 1991). She has taught writing at Hofstra University; Brooklyn College; University of California, Irvine; and the Squaw Valley Community of Writers. She has been an actress for television, theater, and film and lives in Brooklyn, New York.

The Cure

O'Connor, Varley

Literary

“A kaleidoscope of creativity . . . unsentimental and sometimes unpredictable.”—Journal of the American Medical Association
Founded just six years ago, Bellevue Literary Review is already widely recognized as a rare forum for emerging and celebrated writers—among them Julia Alvarez, Raphael Campo, Rick Moody, and Abraham Verghese—on issues of health and healing. Gathered here are poignant and prizewinning stories, essays, and poems, the voices of patients and those who care for them, which form the journal’s remarkable dialogue on “humanity and the human experience.”
 Danielle Ofri, MD, author of Incidental Findings and Singular Intimacies, is the editor in chief of Bellevue Literary Review. She lives in New York City.

The Best of the Bellevue Literary Review

United States

“Barash . . . brilliantly integrat[es] science, literature, and pop culture into elegant and insightful commentaries on the most interesting and important questions of our time. A delightful read.”—Michael Shermer, author of The Science of Good and Evil
“Entertaining and thought-provoking.”—Steven Pinker, author of The Blank Slate
If we are, in part, a product of our genes, can free will exist? Incisive and engaging, this indispensable tour of evolutionary biology runs the gamut of contemporary debates, from science and religion to our place in the universe.
 David Barash is the author of The Myth of Monogamy and Madame Bovary’s Ovaries. He lives in Redmond, Washington.

Natural Selections: Selfish Altruists, Honest Liars, and Other Realities of Evolution

Health, Fitness & Dieting

Barash, David P.

Psychology & Counseling

“The Leper Compound will . . . remain with the reader long after the book has been closed.”—Stuart Dybek, author of I Sailed with Magellan
For Colleen, motherless at seven, isolated from her schizophrenic younger sister, illness unleashes the uncanny and essential of human identity. Growing into womanhood in Rhodesia’s final conflict-ridden years, she transgresses social, racial, and political boundaries in her search for connection. This masterly novel is a searing evocation of late-twentieth-century African life.
 Paula Nangle was raised by missionaries in the United States and southern Africa and now lives in Benton Harbor, Michigan. This is her first novel.

The Leper Compound

Nangle, Paula

“The Lives They Left Behind is a deeply moving testament to the human side of mental illness, and of the narrow margin which so often separates the sane from the mad. It is a remarkable portrait, too, of the life of a psychiatric asylum--the sort of community in which, for better and for worse, hundreds of thousands of people lived out their lives. Darby Penney and Peter Stastny's careful historical (almost archaeological) and biographical reconstructions give us unique insight into these lives which would otherwise be lost and, indeed, unimaginable to the rest of us.”—Oliver Sacks, M.D., Professor of Neurology and Psychiatry, Columbia University Medical Center, Columbia University Artist, and author of Musicophilia “The haunting thing about the suitcase owners is that it’s so easy to identify with them.”—Newsweek “In their poignant detail the items helped rescue these individuals from the dark sprawl of anonymity.”—The New York Times “[The authors] spent 10 years piecing together . . . the lives these patients lived before they were nightmarishly stripped of their identities.”—Newsday More than four hundred abandoned suitcases filled with patients’ belongings were found when Willard Psychiatric Center closed in 1995 after 125 years of operation. They are skillfully examined here and compared to the written record to create a moving—and devastating—group portrait of twentieth-century American psychiatric care.

The Lives They Left Behind: Suitcases from a State Hospital Attic

Penney, Darby

Stastny, Peter

Community & Culture

“Nature writing of a very high order . . . a joyride for those who enjoy deep explorations of logic, human frailty and the laws of nature.”—San Francisco Chronicle
“[Bill Green’s] prose rings with the elemental clarity of the ice he knows so well.”—PEN committee citation
A classic of contemporary nature writing, this award-winning account of Antarctica is now available for the first time in paperback. A new introduction by the author emphasizes the ecological importance of the continent within the global warming crisis.
Bill Green is a professor of interdisciplinary studies at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. He has been conducting research in Antarctica since 1968.

Water, Ice & Stone: Science and Memory on the Antarctic Lakes

Science & Math

Green, Bill

Earth Sciences

“Evocative images, eloquent testimony—a frank and often inspiring exploration of the experience of mental illness.”—Peter D. Kramer, author of Freud: Inventor of the Modern Mind and Listening to Prozac
A tree’s bare limbs against a grey sky, a young woman’s vintage slip, the view beneath a bridge’s span. Charlee Brodsky’s stark black-and-white photographs combine with a concise collection of moving personal narratives to form an eloquent ensemble of tragedy and hope in the struggle to cope with mental illness.
Charlee Brodsky is a documentary photographer and a professor of photography at Carnegie Mellon University.

I Thought I Could Fly: Portraits of Anguish, Compulsion, and Despair

Arts & Photography

Photography & Video

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Books by Bellevue Literary Press