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World Sick: Stories
An international school teacher finds himself drawn into the online culture wars over gun control in the U.S. from the safety of his Beijing apartment. A man living in Egypt just before the 2011 revolution sheds his passivity and discovers an inner strength and innate evil. An embassy worker in Asia shares his hypermodern apartment with ancestral ghosts displaced by gentrification. A young expatriate couple in Vietnam navigate their collapsing marriage while, nearby, a quiet young girl faces the onset of horrific supernatural abilities. In this collection, a group of Americans abroad deal with the challenges and absurdities of life overseas while looking back with increasing bewilderment at their home country. Varying in tone from whimsical to somber and spanning genres such as science fiction, horror and satire, these 20 stories explore the many nuances of transnationalism as a lifestyle and worldview.
162 pages, Kindle Edition
Published December 20, 2019
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About the author
Jason Simon
23 books80 followersJason Simon is a high school English teacher and author from the United States. He and his wife Jennifer spent more than a decade traveling and working outside the U.S. in Cairo, Egypt; Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam and Beijing and Shenzhen, China before resettling in Northeast Ohio in 2021. He writes primarily about American expatriate life and about viewing one's own country from abroad.
His work has appeared in publications such as Medium Chill, Masque & Spectacle and All Persons Fictitious. His first short story collection World Sick: Stories was published in 2019 while his most recent project Repatriated: A Novel is available via Kindle Vella. Much of his short fiction can be found at All Persons Fictitious while his nonfiction writing about education is available at Working Classroom Hero
His work has appeared in publications such as Medium Chill, Masque & Spectacle and All Persons Fictitious. His first short story collection World Sick: Stories was published in 2019 while his most recent project Repatriated: A Novel is available via Kindle Vella. Much of his short fiction can be found at All Persons Fictitious while his nonfiction writing about education is available at Working Classroom Hero
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
December 22, 2019
If it were possible for me to review this objectively, I probably wouldn’t rate it so highly. It’s not perfect. It’s insular and, in some stories, reads like an inside joke that’s tough to understand without context. It’s odd and has no qualms about narrative sacrifices. It’s sometimes wordy and might have benefitted from a professional editor. It engages in contemporary political discourse without making a larger point.
I wouldn’t dream of being objective here, though. I wrote this, and I’m happy with how it came out. I undertook the project of writing and publishing a single story every month back in 2018. I went back and cannibalized other things I’d written years before without bothering to finish or refine. I stopped caring about whether or not my work was good and focused on just getting it finished. Then, I spent a few months proofreading and wordsmithing, and these are the results. I wrote these stories during an incredibly low period in my life, and creativity was, more than anything else, what saw me through.
As for the stories themselves, I can’t rate them objectively, but I’m proud of them, weird as they are. My favorites are the short ones like “The Real Authentic” and “The Williams Maxim” that deal with particular scenes or character sketches rather than full-fledged plots. Others I enjoy just because I worked on them so long. The longest story in the collection “Flammable Girl Sets House on Fire” I wrote and rewrote between 2013 and 2015 before I finished it in late 2018. “Haraam-O-Rama” I started sometime in 2011 and finished in early 2019. For my personal connection to this book as well as the fact that it's the realization of a childhood dream of writing a book, I have no hesitation about giving this book five stars.
I wouldn’t dream of being objective here, though. I wrote this, and I’m happy with how it came out. I undertook the project of writing and publishing a single story every month back in 2018. I went back and cannibalized other things I’d written years before without bothering to finish or refine. I stopped caring about whether or not my work was good and focused on just getting it finished. Then, I spent a few months proofreading and wordsmithing, and these are the results. I wrote these stories during an incredibly low period in my life, and creativity was, more than anything else, what saw me through.
As for the stories themselves, I can’t rate them objectively, but I’m proud of them, weird as they are. My favorites are the short ones like “The Real Authentic” and “The Williams Maxim” that deal with particular scenes or character sketches rather than full-fledged plots. Others I enjoy just because I worked on them so long. The longest story in the collection “Flammable Girl Sets House on Fire” I wrote and rewrote between 2013 and 2015 before I finished it in late 2018. “Haraam-O-Rama” I started sometime in 2011 and finished in early 2019. For my personal connection to this book as well as the fact that it's the realization of a childhood dream of writing a book, I have no hesitation about giving this book five stars.
April 23, 2021
World Sick works well as a story collection about expat living: it's got a good balance of connective tissue and variety. My favorite story was "Flammable Girl Sets House on Fire," and I was surprised by how much I really liked "Haraam-O-Rama." I'm not into serial killer stories, but this one came together well. The juxtaposition of murder against the revolution at the end was really smart. Some of my favorite parts, though, were the sections where the narrators had a chance to reflect, such as the last paragraphs of "Factor VIII" and "The Williams Maxim."
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June 5, 2025Lovely book written by my former HS English Teacher :-)))
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews