Catherine Foulkrod’s Don’t Cure Me is out early next year from McSweeney’s. Their copy:
A new king is being crowned, doctors are on the verge of a massive medical discovery, society is financially and socially segregated by the platelet-count numbers of constant blood tests, and the world is divided into three geographical regions: school, clinic, home. In this lyric sci-fi thriller, a sick young woman is our heroine, and a handful of lone wolf degenerates of the invisible class challenge the medical establishment’s understanding of a debilitating disease to riveting effect. Based on the true history of the autoimmune disorder thrombocytopenia—and the daring experiment of one medical student who isolated the disease in the blood—Don’t Cure Me is a novel dressed in style and plot twists. This book asks: how does the way women are expected to hold their bodies give them heightened powers? If one’s true worth could be codified and trivialized down to a decimal number, would you tolerate it? Are numbers always violent? What does triumph look like in a world that requires people to live segregated by gender and class?
And here’s Deb Olin Unferth’s blurb:
I read this heart-stopping psychosexual medical drama at the edge of my seat, and in the time I spent away from it, I felt it calling to me in its strange language. The story feels daring, both futuristic and of the past, and takes place in a surreal hyper-world and also in the world we know. Is the woman at its center a Frankenstein’s monster-bride, hovering between life and nonlife? Or is she, shockingly, just like everybody else? This mad and brilliant thriller made me consider all social contracts, all technology, all desire.
Biblioklept 