Death of the Pugilist

by Daniel Mason

Death of the Pugilist, or The Famous Battle of Jacob Burke & Blindman McGraw Rising from a childhood of rough dockside brawls, a young bare-knuckle fighter faces off against a legendary behemoth. The Ecstasy of Alfred Russel Wallace In the jungles of the Malay Archipelago, a botanist is struck by an epiphany that will change not only his own life, but the course of science.

Genres: Short Stories

73 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2008

About the author

Daniel Mason is a physician and author of The Piano Tuner (2002), A Far Country (2007), The Winter Soldier (2018), A Registry of My Passage Upon the Earth (2020)--a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize-- and North Woods (2023). His work has been translated into 28 languages, awarded a 2021 Guggenheim Fellowship, the Joyce Carol Oates Prize, the California Book Award, the Northern California Book Award, and a Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. The Piano Tuner was produced as an opera by Music Theatre Wales for the Royal Opera House in London, and adapted to the stage by Lifeline Theatre in Chicago. His short stories and essays have appeared in The Atlantic, Harper’s, Zoetrope: All Story, Zyzzyva, Narrative, and Lapham’s Quarterly, and have been awarded a Pushcart Prize, a National Magazine Award and an O. Henry Prize. An assistant professor in the Stanford University Department of Psychiatry, his research and teaching interests include the subjective experience of mental illness and the influence of literature, history, and culture on the practice of medicine.

Reviews

[Michele · Rating 5 out of 5]

Beautifully crafted short story and interesting subject. Characters brought to life and in so few pages thanks to Mason’s gift for precise, evocative language that perfectly captures emotion and thought. A thought-provoking take on ideas about control, discovery and exploitation.

[Jeslyn · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fantastic short story, another wonderfully paced effort by Mason, whose command of language to convey emotion, circumstance, and pace has never failed to disappoint, at least for this reader!

Also includes The Ecstasy of Alfred Russell Wallace.

[Nick Papandreou]

Great