A close look at stories of maternal death in Malawi that considers their implications in the broader arena of medical knowledge. By the early twenty-first century, about one woman in twelve could expect to die of a pregnancy or childbirth complication in Malawi. Specific deaths became object lessons. Explanatory stories circulated through hospitals and villages, proliferating among a range of practitioners: nurse-midwives, traditional birth attendants, doctors, epidemiologists, herbalists. Was biology to blame? Economic underdevelopment? Immoral behavior? Tradition? Were the dead themselves at fault? In Partial Stories, Claire L. Wendland considers these explanations for maternal death, showing how they reflect competing visions of the past and shared concerns about social change. Drawing on extended fieldwork, Wendland reveals how efforts to legitimate a single story as the authoritative version can render care more dangerous than it might otherwise be. Historical, biological, technological, ethical, statistical, and political perspectives on death usually circulate in different expert communities and different bodies of literature. Here, Wendland considers them together, illuminating dilemmas of maternity care in contexts of acute change, chronic scarcity, and endemic inequity within Malawi and beyond.

"Partial Stories takes readers to Malawi, where roughly one in twenty women can expect to die of a pregnancy or childbirth complication, despite decades of safe-motherhood programs. The stories of these mothers are told in hospitals and villages, by chiefs and doctors, herbalists and nurses, epidemiologists and healers, and competing explanations proliferate. The mothers' stories are used by elders for technical education and moral instruction at a coming-of-age-ritual, a district hospital's mortality review, and in the reflected glow of a computer screen at an international conference. After orienting readers to urban Malawi's context of therapeutic pluralism and material scarcity, Claire Wendland discusses the ways various experts account for maternal death, showing how their diverse explanations reflect competing visions of the past and shared concerns about social change. She looks to a series of pregnancy-related deaths in order to consider bodies as biosocial phenomena, shaped from before birth by history and social inequality. Wendland reveals an uneven therapeutic landscape that pushes experts to improvise, clinically and ethically. Their creative, essential, and sometimes deadly improvisations ask us to reconsider the "best practice" dogmas of global health and transnational research, as well as the nature of medical authority and expertise. Wendland demonstrates how strategies of legitimation render care more dangerous and knowledge more partial than it might otherwise be"--

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Poetry. "I love this book so much. A work of meticulous craft and profound originality, Mary Biddinger's newest collection of prose poems is one of the best books I've read on our historical moment and the decades that led to it. PARTIAL GENIUS reads like a dossier of the psychological landscape of late capitalist America and the end of empire. In the tradition of John Ashbery, but wholly original in her own vision and voice, Biddinger draws from a deep well of poetic intellect and wit to illuminate the existential threats and imaginative possibilities of our collective self-destruction. In 'The Subject Pool' the speaker watches a man tattoo AU COURANT around her thigh. The tattoo artist has no idea. Every poem is chock-full of revelations in every detail. Reading this book felt like sitting by the fire in some secret location with a double agent, smoking her pipe telling tales of all that went down right in front of our faces, while we were all driven to distraction by outrage. To paraphrase Kim Gordon of Sonic Youth, She's got it all in this book."--Heather Derr-Smith "'How many days since you began your last panic...?' Mary Biddinger asks in her latest collection. Quirky, imaginative, and wry in tone, PARTIAL GENIUS is a book that thwarts expectation, turns convention on its head, surprises and delights. Within a narrative scaffolded like a twisting stairway or maze-like hall, these fascinating poems feature high school reunions, job interviews, broken dioramas, and birth control pills; they showcase apologies, parlor games, and consolation prizes, intricacies, illusions, and tricks. Comfort is found in a bar of bathroom soap. An assistant manager wonders why a blazer is named for fire. A radio is implanted in the chest as a companion to the heart. Spheres of uncertainty juxtaposed against landscapes of failure create the book's complex beauty and dangerous edge, as Biddinger claims, 'The best part of figure skating was getting cut.' PARTIAL GENIUS comes to us as both a study of despair and a gleaming beacon of hope."--Jennifer Militello

Autobiographical writing by the "hero" of Jack Kerouac's On the road.

From award-winning author Ken Liu comes his much anticipated second volume of short stories. Ken Liu is one of the most lauded short story writers of our time. This collection includes a selection of his science fiction and fantasy stories from the last five years—sixteen of his best—plus a new novelette. In addition to these seventeen selections, The Hidden Girl and Other Stories also features an excerpt from book three in the Dandelion Dynasty series, The Veiled Throne.

James Thompson explores the problems of theatre practice in communities affected by war and exclusion. Each chapter or "story" is written in a lively and accessible style and draws on a range of contemporary performance theories.

WHAT IS THE STORY GRID? The Story Grid is a tool developed by editor Shawn Coyne to analyze stories and provide helpful editorial comments. It's like a CT Scan that takes a photo of the global story and tells the editor or writer what is working, what is not, and what must be done to make what works better and fix what's not. The Story Grid breaks down the component parts of stories to identify the problems. And finding the problems in a story is almost as difficult as the writing of the story itself (maybe even more difficult). The Story Grid is a tool with many applications: 1. It will tell a writer if a Story ?works? or ?doesn't work. 2. It pinpoints story problems but does not emotionally abuse the writer, revealing exactly where a Story (not the person creating the Story'the Story) has failed. 3. It will tell the writer the specific work necessary to fix that Story's problems. 4. It is a tool to re-envision and resuscitate a seemingly irredeemable pile of paper stuck in an attic drawer. 5. It is a tool that can inspire an original creation.