Judith's Pavilion

Book excerpt: A doctor's memoir in the best tradition of William Carlos Williams, Marc Flitter recreates the life-or-death drama of brain surgery as he has practiced it for more than twenty years, filling an imaginary hospital wing with the true stories of the patients and colleagues whose fates will haunt him forever. "His prose is as elegant and delicate as his surgery, and his characters come to life as those from the best short stories do, and yet their power derives from our realization that these are actual people whose lives have transformed the physician who encountered them" (The New York Times Book Review).