Various Antidotes

by Joanna Scott

Contains tales featuring real and imaginary figures drawn from the history of science and medicine and capturing their peculiar obsessions

Genres: Short Stories, Fiction, Literature

Paperback

First published January 1, 1994

About the author

from the backcover:
Joanna Scott is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Rochester. She has also taught in the creative writing programs at Princeton University and the University of Maryland. She was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship during the writing of Arrogance.

Librarian note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name.

Joanna^^Scott

Reviews

[Torea Frey · Rating 4 out of 5]

Usually I find some prosaic quote to extract from the book I'm reading, for your supposed pleasure but really to console myself with the beautiful words of others, but with Joanna Scott, I've found it hard. These short stories are so strange and self-contained that some one-off about hanging an elephant or bees stinging their faithful keeper to death or unleashing thousands of mice upon a town would just be ... odd.

Oh, who am I kidding. The last line of the last story: "Everything alive waited for the next great change, and I waited along with it, caught in a state of nearly unbearable suspense."

These stories are, for me, almost painfully good. After much of last year's reading, I was exhausted by the lovely but often trite narratives of young women, young, and confused, and with a vagina, in New York City. Meet a man who grinds lenses. A woman puzzling out a naked, screaming inmate in a mental asylum. A man suffering amnesia after putting a bullet in his head.

[Theresia · Rating 4 out of 5]

First thought: Oh Burke, we meet again!

(I first met William Burke, of the infamous Burke-Hare murders, in Mary Roach's Stiff. Here Scott offers an insight to his mind.)

Scott's use of science facts and trivia to scaffold her story is enjoyable, considering that this collection is more about characters. Van Leeuwenhoek's daughter's tears? Wow. Also, Charlotte Corday? Yes. Scott's women are delightful. Let's have more women—women who cook, who nurture, who teach, who mourn, who murder, who don't have to justify their being women.

[Julia Brown · Rating 4 out of 5]

I put Joanna Scott in the same universe as Steven Millhauser - their default authorial voices are often encyclopedic and authoritative. They often use historical settings, or they set their stories in other, alternative presents.

Dorothea Dix: Samaritan is the standout in this collection for me. The wheel in this story turns imperceptibly, and yet, by the end, you're in a very different place from where you started.

I also enjoyed X Number of Possibilities.

[Jenna · Rating 4 out of 5]

I don't usually like short stories, but this book worked for me because there was a common theme throughout the stories. If you like scientific and wierd, you should like this.

[Pamela · Rating 3 out of 5]

The primary interest in reading these stories was the expectation of science related short fiction. But that's not quite what I found. The science is a stretch in some of the eleven stories. A few the science was more prominent, but this is also old, historical science, typically 17th or 18th Century.

Overall the stories were set up quickly, the writing was decent in that aspect. I just didn't care for most of the topics. Odd set of stories really.


contents:
Concerning mold upon the skin, etc.
Bees bees bees
Nowhere
The marvelous sauce
Chloroform jags
Dorothea Dix: Samaritan
X number of possibilities
Convicta et combusta
You must relax!
A borderline case
Tumbling

[Karen Carlson]

h/t https://electricliterature.com/7-shor...
I loved her pushcart winning story Knowledge Gallery and liked the later Infidels; this takes historical people from science and creates fictional situations.

[jess sanford · Rating 2 out of 5]

I feel like 2 stars is low, but I couldn't justify the 3-star statement that 'I liked' this book. I didn't hate reading it, I didn't have to force myself through but I found very little enjoyment in it.

My biggest gripe is that while the book is very well-written, is that it holds a premise that I at first thought was fascinating and full of potential, but ultimately it suffers from some kind of lack of ambition. There's a certain comfort level Scott never steps out of and I think it shows.

Some of the stories on paper (pardon the awful cliche / pun) are interesting but something in the execution never grabbed me. I didn't find any of the characters to be all that compelling or engaging.

The final story, 'Tumbling', was probably the most interesting but even there little things bugged me, even from a style standpoint; the narrator will use the word 'fucking' in passing as if this is her manner of communication yet later on she says 'rump' in place of 'butt', even?

There's a kind of cohesion missing here, and the ambition never quite caught up to the premise for me. All that said, not one story is 'bland' either, and as I said the writing overall is quite good, it just never managed to become satisfying.

[Lindsay · Rating 3 out of 5]

I don't like it when reading feels like work. Some of these stories fascinated me ("Concerning mold...," "The Marvelous Sauce"), but many rubbed me the wrong way, and I think this was a result of the way they were narrated. The Dorothea Dix story, for example.

[Sarah · Rating 5 out of 5]

For literary science dorks with short attention spans.

[Pam Porter · Rating 2 out of 5]

Some of the stories are interesting and some are just weird. Also, the fix of factual science history and fiction for the creation of art was a strange mix that I had trouble getting used to.