Maura

Devereux

        Biographical Information

Maura Devereux is the author of a novel entitled The Sorrows and a short story collection entitled Pathophilia.  She has degrees in Journalism and Humanities from the University of Colorado at Boulder, and contributes journalism and criticism on such wide-ranging topics as travel, health and medicine, and literature.  She lives and works in San Francisco.

Full-Length Fiction

The Sorrows

Following the publication of Goethe's The Sorrows of Young Werther in 1774, there was a suicide epidemic in Europe.  To emulate the book's hero, sensitive youths killed themselves in romantic fits, to free themselves from their hopeless passions.  The Sorrows follows a modern day love suicide epidemic, which mysteriously creeps like a virus through a nameless American city, arousing both irrational ardor and despair, and moving even strong people to acts of self-immolation.

The story unfolds through the interwoven narratives of an unlikely underground of witnesses in a region of the city that serves as a nexus for sorrow.  Joel is a failed Werther scholar who takes a subsistence job at St. Catherine's Hospital at the beginning of the epidemic.  There, he may freely wander the halls, and he watches as the coincidence of injuries forms a mosaic.  When it becomes clear what he is seeing, he uses his anonymity to exploit the suicides, trying to glean from his illicit interviews with them some insight into the metaphysical nature of love itself.  Joel lives in an apartment near St. Catherine's, and his neighbor, Elena, also reaps a benefit from the epidemic.  Elena is a Psychic Advisor in the Romany gypsy tradition, and while she does not have Joel's comprehensive understanding of the situation, she does know that these swells of unfulfilled longing offer her a good opportunity for financial gain.  Elena tries to keep her home together for her teenage daughter Renita, who, at her vulnerable age, is bombarded with conflicting messages of love and loyalty, and who may, at any point, succumb to the prevailing hysteria.  All the while, a mocking chorus of hospital and emergency workers dutifully cleans up the mess that may be spiritual in impetus, but which is always, undeniably, grossly physical in the end.

The book reads like a wry and subtle psychological thriller, as we watch characters crisscross each other's paths and wonder who will be the next to fall to their irresistible yearnings.  However, as stories of loves lost and loves never won layer upon each other and build to a thundering fugue, we are left with the sense that maybe even as modern and sensible as we are, we are not immune to deeply buried longings for convulsive, annihilating passion.

Read an excerpt from The Sorrows

Pathophilia

The ten stories in Pathophilia are stories of the fascination with flesh and its failure, and the confluence of art and biology. They are tales of transformation through infirmity, in which individuals learn to love their disease.

In "Deep Love," a band of gutter Goths get hepatitis after an ill-advised placenta ritual. In "Don Juju," a modern day Don Juan must cope with vision enhancement accoutrements while enacting his amorous adventures. "A. M. Rush" features the field notes of an amateur sexologist determined to reveal widespread, sublimated perversity, while "Des Esseintes Takes a Dipso Apprentice in the Parking Lot of Liquor Mart" explores the seductive synesthesia that lives in a bottle of sour apple schnapps. Though the stories range in tone from tragic to darkly absurd, all combine the cerebral puzzle-solving of clinical diagnosis with a romantic lyricism, demonstrating the sometimes surprising ways in which our lives are circumscribed by the bounds of our bodies.

Read an excerpt from Pathophilia

Publications

J.G. Ballard Conversations

RE/Search Publications, 2005

RE/Search Publications

Fiction on the Web

"Hip" on Collectedstories.com

"Love and Activated Charcoal" on Collectedstories.com

"Deep Love" on Exquisite Corpse

Non-fiction on the Web

"Daimonji, Kyoto" for Storyhouse

Author interview with Dagoberto Gilb for Collectedstories.com

Contact Maura Devereux

Contact: info@mauradevereux.com