Sickness, Health: Stories

From the critically acclaimed author of Offseason comes a wildly brilliant debut story collection with a sick sense of humor and a deep respect for the eccentric.

A thirteen-year-old girl falls in love with her dentist; an adult woman moves back home and must share a bedroom with her father; two friends reconnect and visit their disgraced high school teacher. Stuff gets weird in Avigayl Sharp’s mischievous, stylish, and beautifully bizarre collection, Sickness, Health. 

Throughout these eleven stories we follow characters whose demented longings for love and approval only untether them further from so-called “real life.” As constrained by the body as they are by the mind, hysterically attuned to the obscenities of the 21st century, they suffer from arrested development and countless physical ailments as they’re forced, time and again, to return to the site of their undoing—where, if they’re lucky, they might catch a glimpse of salvation.

Mercilessly funny, gleefully perverse, Sickness, Health is an existential missive from an unwell world and a cure for the soul rot that ails us.