Seven titles that vividly capture hospitalization

Anna DeForest is an author and physician whose work has appeared in the Alaska Quarterly Review, the Journal of the American Medical Association, the New England Journal of Medicine, and the Paris Review. DeForest has an MFA from Brooklyn College and an MD from Columbia University, and currently works in palliative care at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York City.

A History of Present Illness is her first novel.

At Electric Lit DeForest tagged seven books that "stretch across genres to capture the confusion and powerlessness of being subject to a body, subject to a hospital, subject to life and death." One title on the list:

The Hospital by Ahmed Bouanani

The Hospital depicts the instant unwinding that comes with protracted illness and confinement. In a delirious dream of time and memory, the narrator, unclearly tubercular, finds himself stuck in a dirty hospital somewhere in the Magreb, his fellow patients all wild men who cling to stories of sex and violence to imitate the vigor of the lives they once led. Set apart from the rhythms of regular life, these men face the degradation and debility of the ailing body—true for us all, but starkly revealed by the enforced humility of medicalization.

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue