Fiction. [Eric Basso] remains one of the most interesting writers in the country, someone whose work does not fit conveniently into categories like metafiction or language-centered poetry, but whose poetry, fiction and dramatic writing extend our sense of what terms like modernism and postmodernism mean -- Stephen-Paul Martin. THE BEAK DOCTOR, concluding this collection of five short stories, was first published in The Chicago Review in 1977 and has enjoyed a cult reputation among a core of avant-garde writers. The book begins with a tale of death and hideous resurrection, and concludes with the harrowing odyssey of a masked man (the Beak Doctor) in a fogbound city turned upside down by a plague of sleeping sickness.