A Registry of My Passage Upon the Earth: Stories, Paperback

A Pulitzer Prize Finalist: This collection of moving short stories is "a treasure trove of lush scene setting in faraway times and places" (Alexis Burling, San Francisco Chronicle).

On a fateful flight, a balloonist makes a discovery that changes her life forever. A telegraph operator finds an unexpected companion in the middle of the Amazon. A doctor is beset by seizures, in which he is possessed by a second, perhaps better, version of himself. And in Regency London, a bare-knuckle fighter prepares to face his most fearsome opponent, while a young mother seeks a miraculous cure for her ailing son.

At times funny and irreverent, always moving and deeply urgent, these stories--among them a National Magazine Award and a Pushcart Prize winner--cap a fifteen-year project. From the Nile's depths to the highest reaches of the atmosphere, from volcano-racked islands to an asylum on the outskirts of Rio de Janeiro, these are tales of ecstasy, epiphany, and what the New York Times Magazine called the "struggle for survival . . . hand to hand, word to word," by "one of the finest prose stylists in American fiction."

A Library Journal Best Book of 2020

About author(s):Daniel Mason is the author of the collection A Registry of My Passage Upon the Earth, a finalist for the 2021 Pulitzer Prize and winner of the California Book Award, and three novels, including The Winter Soldier and The Piano Tuner. An assistant professor in the Stanford University Department of Psychiatry, his work has been translated into twenty-eight languages and awarded a Guggenheim fellowship, the Joyce Carol Oates Prize for Fiction, and a Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts.