With Folk Songs for Trauma Surgeons, award-winning author Keith Rosson
once again delves into notions of family, identity, indebtedness, loss,
and hope, with the surefooted merging of literary fiction and magical
realism he's explored in previous novels. In "Dunsmuir," a newly sober
husband buys a hearse to help his wife spread her sister's ashes, while
"The Lesser Horsemen" illustrates what happens when God instructs the
Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse to go on a team-building cruise as a way
of boosting their frayed morale. In "Brad Benske and the Hand of Light,"
an estranged husband seeks his wife's whereabouts through a
fortuneteller after she absconds with a cult, and the returning soldier
in "Homecoming" navigates the strange and ghostly confines of his
hometown, as well as the boundaries of his own grief. With grace,
imagination, and a brazen gallows humor, Folk Songs for Trauma
Surgeons merges the fantastic and the everyday, and includes new work
as well as award-winning favorites.