The stories in A Better Angel describe the terrain of human suffering--illness, regret, mourning, sympathy--in the most unusual of ways. In Stab, a bereaved twin starts a friendship with a homicidal fifth grader in the hope that she can somehow lead him back to his dead brother. In Why Antichrist? a boy tries to contact the spirit of his dead father and finds himself talking to the Devil instead. In the remarkable title story, a ne'er do well pediatrician returns home to take care of his dying father, all the while under the scrutiny of an easily-disappointed heavenly agent.

With Gob's Grief and The Children's Hospital, Chris Adrian announced himself as a writer of rare talent and originality. The stories in A Better Angel, some of which have appeared in The New Yorker, Tin House, and McSweeney's, demonstrate more of his endless inventiveness and wit, and they confirm his growing reputation as a most exciting and unusual literary voice--of heartbreaking, magical, and darkly comic tales.

Chris Adrian is the author Gob's Grief and The Children's Hospital. He lives in Boston, where he is a pediatrician and divinity student. A New York Times Book Review Notable Book

The stories in A Better Angel describe the terrain of human suffering--illness, regret, mourning, sympathy--in the most unusual of ways. In Stab, a bereaved twin starts a friendship with a homicidal fifth grader in the hope that she can somehow lead him back to his dead brother. In Why Antichrist? a boy tries to contact the spirit of his dead father and finds himself talking to the Devil instead. In the title story, a ne'er do well pediatrician returns home to take care of his dying father, all the while under the scrutiny of an easily-disappointed heavenly agent.

The stories in A Better Angel, some of which have appeared in The New Yorker, Tin House, and McSweeney's, demonstrate more of Chris Aiden's endless inventiveness and wit, and they confirm his growing reputation as an unusual literary voice of darkly magical comic tales. These stories are funny and bizarre without giving over to cutesiness or kitsch . . . The darkness in Adrian's writing is balanced with compassion, wit, and the haunting, eerie scenarios he constructs are only eclipsed by the characters--the children, spirits, and Civil War reenactors--with which he fills them.--The Portland Mercury

To read Chris Adrian is to take part in the exciting process of watching a talented and original writer gain mastery of his powerful gifts.--Myla Goldberg, The New York Times Book Review

Adrian, himself a pediatrician and seminary student, is a lucid, brilliant fortune-teller. He unveils our demons, who, in the wake of their visitations upon these children, reveal something you can only call the face of God.--Tom Chiarella, Esquire

He has a strong following among the literary magazine set, and with his latest book he has a chance to win a mainstream audience. A Better Angel stands to outperform its predecessors, as many of its stories have appeared in places like the New Yorker and the Paris Review, and at a little over 200 pages, it's eminently accessible.--Lauren Mechling, The Wall Street Journal

In these stories Mr. Adrian paints beautiful still lifes of near-dead bodies among ghosts and angels, prompting questions about what lies beneath the body, the wax mannequin, or what lies beyond--beyond the modern scene of death, the dirty, fluorescent hospital.--Lily Swistel, The New York Observer

Adrian's language is powered by unflinching detail (a dead man's open eyes have 'the look of spoiling grapes'), and he's at his best when in the sickroom, as in 'The Sum of Our Parts', in which a comatose soul trails the living around the hospital where her body lies dying. The title story, which combines dark comedy and deep pathos, is not only the standout of this volume but also one of the best stories published in recent memory. Adrian has been known as a writer's writer, but with this book, readers would do well to stake their claim.--Radhika Jones, Time

The new collection of short stories by Boston novelist Chris Adrian (The Children's Hospital) reads like the off-kilter tales of a mad man who sits next to you in the waiting area of a hospital emergency room insisting the world's about to end. His creepy accounts of profound illness, violent aggression, strange visions and hovering doom resonate, and you wind up thinking of them for days afterward. In Adrian's case, we're dealing with a great mind, not a lost one. The material in A Better Angel is close to Adrian's heart, drawn from his background as a pediatrician and divinity school student. Each deals in one way or another with the sometimes uneasy alliance of body and soul, nature and the supernatural.--Tyrone Beason, The Seattle Times

Drug-addled doctors, evil teenagers and winged spirits are among the characters in Chris Adrian's new volume of eccentric and fabulistic stories, A Better Angel . . . Adrian admits that his work at the hospital often inspires his fiction, but he radically transforms events from his everyday experience, fitting them into a richly surreal framework . . . Like their creator, the characters in A Better Angel tend to channel their grim obsessions into transformative creativity: One, a teenager who's spent much of her life in the hospital, is writing a book about diseased animals. When an incompetent intern asks, 'Do you think anyone would buy that?' she answers, 'There's a book about shit. . . . Why not one about sickness and death?' This could be an epigraph for much of Adrian's brutal yet beautiful world, where the sometimes horrifying realities of the body mingle with the pleasures of fantasy.--Elizabeth Isadora Gold, Time Out New York

They are eternal questions with no easy answers--indeed, no universally agreed-upon answers at all. Why does evil exist? Why does God--if God exists--allow the innocent to suffer? Are there spirits emanating from some alternate universe that can instruct us, harangue us, punish us, save us? They are questions that a doctor or student of theology might ponder. Chris Adrian, who is both a pediatric oncologist and a student at Harvard Divinity School, has given them much thought, and because he is a writer of uncommon imagination and expressiveness, he presents them in original and gripping ways. Any of those callings might serve an ordinary seeker of truth, but Adrian is pursuing all three to find answers. Also the author of two novels, Gob's Grief and The Children's Hospital, he here offers nine short stories, linked by themes. Most involve children who are emotionally wounded or physically ill. Many hinge on the deaths of relatives and their lingering effect on surviving children. Some take place in hospitals. A few echo powerfully the horror of the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11. All are written in language so beautiful and compelling that we go willingly where Adrian takes us, despite the pain and terror an

"The author of Gob's Grief and The Children's Hospital returns with a sublime collection of nine stories whose wide assortment of characters, many of them children, fugue around death, are plagued by remembrance of things past and are possessed by violence. In 'Stab,' a young protagonist whose twin died, joins a little girl in a killing spree of neighborhood animals, eventually setting their sights on larger prey. A woman who tries to commit suicide in 'The Sum of Our Parts' wanders hospital halls as an astral projection, witnessing the unexpressed desires of her 'friends' in pathology. And a Juno-esque teen, a hospital regular with short-gut syndrome, writes an animal book of sublimated child-ward life: bunnies with 'high colonic ruin,' cats with 'leukemic indecisiveness' and monkeys with 'chronic kidney doom.' The story 'Why Antichrist?' gives us two teenagers who have each lost parents, one to 9/11 (which looms large in the collection); the devil is soon literally between the teens. With heartbreaking imagination, Adrian illuminates how people act out their grief on their own bodies and the bodies of others, and enter the world of the spirit in the process." Publishers Weekly (Starred Review) (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.)

“The title story, which combines dark comedy and deep pathos, is not only the standout of this volume but also one of the best stories published in recent memory. Adrian has been known as a writer's writer, but with this book, readers would do well to stake their claim.”Radhika Jones,  Time

“[A Better Angel]...is held forward in the pared beauty of Adrians unshowy, lambent prose and gives the collection almost a bottomless depth.”San Francisco Chronicle

“Mr. Adrian is a gifted, courageous writer as demonstrated in his well-received novels, “Gobs Grief” and “The Childrens Hospital”  and with this collection he continues to take far-reaching risks. Unspeakable grief and the innate will to survive create opposing forces in these stories, producing a universe bursting with humor and life.”S. Kirk Walsh, The New York Times

“His best work yet . . . Not one of the stories teeters out of control. They are strange, beautiful, and unforgettable. Like Kafka, Poe, and Salman Rushdie, Adrian knows the best way to bring the miraculous to life is to write it realistically.”John Freeman, The Boston Globe

“To read Chris Adrian is to take part in the exciting process of watching a talented and original writer gain mastery of his powerful gifts."   Myla Goldberg, The New York Times Book Review “Adrian is interested in illnesss altered states, but this doesnt mean he thinks pain is ennobling. On the contrary, throughout his bleak and brilliant work he has been sensitive to the ways grief ravages those it strikes.”Sylvia Brownrigg, New York Times Book Review

“Adrian, himself a pediatrician and seminary student, is a lucid, brilliant fortune-teller. He unveils our demons, who, in the wake of their visitations upon these children, reveal something you can only call the face of God.”Tom Chiarella, Esquire

“Spirits and demons and a persistent faith populate Chris Adrian's crystalline stories in A BETTER ANGEL (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)…In Adrian's lyrical kingdom…most attempts at intimacy, friendship, and love become something more dark, complex and spiritually wrenching.”Vince Passaro, O, The Oprah Magazine

“Adrian is clearly no MFA mill product…Hes a pediatrician and a divinity student, and he throws these two fields of human endeavor at the walls with a good bit of fearlessness…[He] dares to use (and re-use) heavily symbolic incidents and character facets, tell the tales in a modest voice, and then challenge himself to make the right combinations of twists in plot and story structure…Theres a high percentage of powerful (and often harrowing) stories here.”T.E. Lyons, Louisville Electric Observer

“Adrian, a divinity student and a doctor, has a beautiful instinct for finding the deepest chords within his characters.”John Freeman, Star Tribune

“Focused otherwise, the haunting energy and supernal visions found in A Better Angel, Chris Adrians new story collection, could have inspired an occult religion…He sublimely melds the beautiful and the terrible, which makes for a fondness of grotesques reminiscent of the great Southern gothic wirters.”Cheston Knapp, Richmond Times

“Adrian is interested in illnesss altered states, but this doesnt mean he thinks pain is ennobling. On the contrary, throughout his bleak and brilliant work he has been sensitive to the ways grief ravages those it strikes.”Sylvia Brownrigg, New York Times Book Review

“Adrian, himself a pediatrician and seminary student, is a lucid, brilliant fortune-teller. He unveils our demons, who, in the wake of their visitations upon these children, reveal something you can only call the face of God.”Tom Chiarella, Esquire

“Spirits and demons and a persistent faith populate Chris Adrian's crystalline stories in A BETTER ANGEL (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)…In Adrian's lyrical kingdom…most attempts at intimacy, friendship, and love become something more dark, complex and spiritually wrenching.”Vince Passaro, O, The Oprah Magazine

“Abrasive, accusatory, despairing and, more than often enough, quite unforgettable fiction.”Kirkus Reviews

“He has a strong following among the literary magazine set, and with his latest book he has a chance to win a mainstream audience. ‘A Better Angel stands to outperform its predecessors, as many of its stories have appeared in places like the New Yorker and the Paris Review, and at a little over 200 pages, it's eminently accessible.”- Lauren Mechling, Wall Street Journal

“Edgy and otherworldly, this is a book of dark dreams.”Arizona Republic

“[A Better Angel is] written in language so beautiful and compelling that we go willingly where Adrian takes us…That he can make his dark materials so illuminationg and powerful is a testament to his immense talent.”Carole Goldberg, Sun-Sentinel (Florida)

“These stories are funny and bizarre without giving over to cutesiness or kitsch . . . The darkness in Adrians writing is balanced with compassion, wit, and the haunting, eerie scenarios he constructs are only eclipsed by the charactersthe children, spirits, and Civil War reenactorswith which he fills them.”Portland Mercury

“Chris Adrians stories in ‘A Better Angel are as perverse and holy as a parable, as comforting and obsessive as a rosary, and as linguistically virtuosic as the finest of poems.  In this hilarious, beautiful, unsettling story collection, Adrian shows us how to love without idealizing, and how to see wings even on the backs of children who are difficult, delusional, odd, and dying.  He makes the unnoticed thrum of the real world become audible again.”David Daley, The Courier-Journal (Louisville)

“Adrian explores his subjects with caution, respect, and most of all, imagination . . . His prose is heady enough to support Big Statementshe has the rare ability to talk about souls and be sincere . . . There are stories so thoroughly imagines and expertly written that alone they warrant the price of the entire collection.”The Rake

“[A] soul stirring collection.”Seattle Times

The stories in A Better Angel describe the terrain of human suffering--illness, regret, mourning, sympathy--in the most unusual of ways. In Stab, a bereaved twin starts a friendship with a homicidal fifth grader in the hope that she can somehow lead him back to his dead brother. In Why Antichrist? a boy tries to contact the spirit of his dead father and finds himself talking to the Devil instead. In the remarkable title story, a ne'er do well pediatrician returns home to take care of his dying father, all the while under the scrutiny of an easily-disappointed heavenly agent.

With Gob's Grief and The Children's Hospital, Chris Adrian announced himself as a writer of rare talent and originality. The stories in A Better Angel, some of which have appeared in The New Yorker, Tin House, and McSweeney's, demonstrate more of his endless inventiveness and wit, and they confirm his growing reputation as a most exciting and unusual literary voice--of heartbreaking, magical, and darkly comic tales.