D Minor: Stories

by Laura Otis

In four intertwined tales, Laura Otis invites readers into the minds
of social outsiders and synesthetes with super-sensitive ears.
While leading vastly different lives in German and American cities,
four loners fight to thrive on their own terms. During the pandemic,
an English teacher discarded by her married boyfriend rediscovers
her will to live when she falls in love with a television detective.
A supermarket worker who can hear through touch bonds with
a stray cat who bites her hand. A disrespected museum guard
gets in trouble for making visitors look at a painting that obsesses
him. A translator frustrated by the world’s noise and slow pace
gets stuck behind an old woman on a stalled escalator. Can these
solitary people use their exquisite hearing to heal their wounds
and discover inspiration in unexpected places?
D Minor’s four stories subtly link the lives of social outsiders who
find surprising ways to recover from abuse.

178 pages, Paperback

Published August 12, 2024

About the author

Trained as a neuroscientist and literary scholar, Laura Otis, Ph.D., studies the ways that literature and science intersect. In her interdisciplinary research, she compares scientific and literary writers' descriptions of memory, identity, emotion, and thought. Her research has been supported by MacArthur, Guggenheim, Fulbright, and Humboldt Fellowships. Otis earned her BS in Biochemistry at Yale University, her MA in Neuroscience from the University of California at San Francisco, her PhD in Comparative Literature from Cornell University, and her MFA in Fiction from Warren Wilson College. Since 2004 she has been a Professor of English at Emory University, where she teaches interdisciplinary courses on literature, neuroscience, cognitive science, and medicine. Otis is the author of Organic Memory (1994), Membranes (1999), Networking (2001), Müller’s Lab (2007), Rethinking Thought (2016), and Banned Emotions (2019). She has also translated neurobiologist Santiago Ramón y Cajal’s Vacation Stories (2001) into English and has edited Literature and Science in the Nineteenth Century: An Anthology (2002). A fiction-writer as well as a scholar, she is the author of the novels Clean, Refiner’s Fire, Lacking in Substance, The Tantalus Letters, and The Memory Hive. Her current project, The Neuroscience of Craft, examines what neuroscientists and creative writers can learn from each other about how sensations blend in people’s minds.