Doctor Olaf van Schuler's Brain »

Kirsten Menger-Anderson's stories have been short-listed for the Andre Dubus Award, the Richard Yates Award, the Glimmer Train Short Story Award for New Writers, and the Iowa Review story contest and have appeared in a number of literary publications. She lives in San Francisco with her husband and baby.

In 1664 Dr. Olaf van Schuler flees the Old World and arrives in New Amsterdam with his lunatic mother, two bags of medical implements, and a carefully guarded book of his own medicines. He is the first in what will become a long line of peculiar physicians. Plagued by madness and guided by an intense desire to cure human affliction, each generation of this unusual family is driven by the science of its day: spontaneous combustion, phrenology, animal magnetism, electrical shock treatment, psychosurgery, genetic research. As they make their way in the world, New York City, too, evolves—from the dark and rough days of the seventeenth century to the towering, frenetic metropolis of today.

Like Patrick Süskind's classic novel Perfume, Kirsten Menger-Anderson's debut is a literary cabinet of curiosities—fascinating and unsettling, rich and utterly singular.

The Barnes & Noble Review

In the opening sentence of Kirsten Menger-Anderson's collection of linked short stories, we're told the titular doctor arrives in New Amsterdam in 1664 "with his lunatic mother, two bags of medical implements, and a carefully guarded book of his own medicines." He is the first in a long line of physicians who treat maladies with a mixture of experiments, fringe science and spiritualism. Doctor Van Schuler s obsession is dissecting brains which contain "the seat of man's soul," but his descendants specialize in phrenology, spontaneous combustion, hysteria, neurasthenia, electric shock therapy, lobotomies and a radium curative called a Revigator. If some of those terms are lost in today's lexicon, the tales in this book remind us how they were once hotly debated medical practices. On her web site, Menger-Anderson writes: "We are all limited by the sophistication of our tools and the generally accepted theories of our times." Yesterday's animal magnetism was once today s silicone breast implants (the subject of a story in the latter pages of the collection). As Sheila Talbot's leaking implants show, the medical field may have advanced but human misery and suffering remain the same. Menger-Anderson has not only done her research -- deftly documenting three centuries of medical quackery -- but she also knows how to weave a tale. She holds the reader spellbound from the first slice into a corpse's brain to the final probe of genetic research. --David Abrams

Doctor Olaf van Schuler's Brain, 1664 1

The Burning, 1725 19

Happy Effects, 1741 39

My Name is Lubbert Das, 1765 61

Hysteria, 1820 79

Reading Grandpa's Head, 1837 105

The Baquet, 1850 127

Neurasthenia: A Victorian Love Story, 1871 157

The Siblings, 1910 183

A Spoonful Makes You Fertile, 1931 207

Salk and Sabin, 1955 229

The Story of Her Breasts, 1971 247

The Doctors, 2006 271