Image:  Surgical team, Field Hospital, Ostrozec, September, 1915 (Image courtesy Osterreichische Nationalbibliothek) ​

Daniel Mason is a physician and author of The Piano Tuner (2002), A Far Country (2007), The Winter Soldier ​(2018), and A Registry of My Passage Upon the Earth (2020).  His work has been translated into 28 languages, awarded the Joyce Carol Oates Prize and the Northern California Book Award for Fiction, and shortlisted for the James Tait Black Memorial Prize.  The Piano Tuner was produced as an opera by Music Theatre Wales, and adapted to the stage by Lifeline Theatre.  His short stories and essays have appeared in ​The Atlantic, Harper’s, Zoetrope: All Story and Lapham’s Quarterly; in 2014 he was a recipient of a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. A Clinical Assistant Professor in the Stanford University Department of Psychiatry, his research and teaching interests include the subjective experience of mental illness and the influence of literature, history, and culture on the practice of medicine.

Media Contact:  ​Lena.Little@hbgusa.com 

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Interviews

Print

Guardian UK: A Registry of My Passage upon the Earth
​​Profile: New York Times Magazine
LitHub interview:  Five books about doctors
Narrative Magazine N10 Interview
​Little, Brown, and Company, Author Q&A 
​Stanford Scope

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​Radio

BBC Radio 4:  Open Book: A Registry of My Passage upon the Earth
RTE Radio 1: Arena: A Registry of My Passage upon the Earth

Thacker Mountain Radio
​NPR: Here & Now ​Oct 4, 2018

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Reading, Courses and Syllabi

PSYC82:  
​THE LITERATURE OF PSYCHOSIS

Academic Psychiatry:  Literature and the Psychotic Experience

Syllabus:

• ​Elyn Saks, The Center Cannot Hold
• Daniel Paul Schreber, Memoirs of my Nervous Illness
• Esmé Wang, "Perdition Days"
• Karl Jaspers, “Delusion and Awareness of Reality”, General Psychopathology
• FILM:  Invasion of the Body Snatchers
• Lu Xun 1918 A Madman’s Diary; in Chinese
• Sechehaye, Autobiography of a Schizophrenic girl
• Vladimir Nabokov, “Signs and Symbols”
• Georg Buchner, “Lenz”; (in German: Lenz)
• Vaslav Nijinsky, “Letter to Romola” from The Diary of Vaslav Nijinsky
• Prinzhorn Artwork of the Mentally Ill​
  • Franz Xaver Messerschmidt's character heads at the Getty
  • Museu Bispo do Rosário
• Gilman, “The Yellow Wallpaper"
• Virginia Woolf, “Septimus Smith,” from Mrs. Dalloway
• FILM: The Passion of Joan of Arc
• J.L. Borges, “The Aleph” (in Spanish:  El Aleph)
• James, Varieties of Religious Experience, Lectures XVI and XVII Mysticism
• FILM: Through a Glass Darkly
• ​Philip K Dick.  Ubik
• Anonymous- “Tom of Bedlam”; English Broadside Ballad Archive
• Shakespear, King Lear
  • Samuel Harsnett's Declaration

ANTHRO186:  CULTURE AND MADNESS: Anthropological and Psychiatric Approaches to Mental Illness 

Selected readings:

• Tanya Luhrmann, Of two minds
• Mark Nichter, "Idioms of Distress"
• William Styron, Darkness Visible
• Arthur Kleinman, "Neurasthenia and Depression"
• Sing Lee "Diagnosis Postponed"
• Sigmund Freud, "Mourning and Melancholia"
• Kral, et al. “Canandian Intuit Community Engagement in Suicide”
• Rachel Aviv, “Which way Madness Lies”
• Jones and Luhrmann, “Beyond the Sensory”
• Murphy "Psychiatric labeling in cross-cultural perspective"
• Luhrmann, Padmavati, Tharoor, Osei  "Differences in voice-hearing experiences of people with  psychosis in the U.S.A., India and Ghana: interview-based study"
• The Truman Show film
• Gold "The Truman Show delusion: Psychosis in the global village"
• Barrett "Kurt Schneider in Borneo: Do First Rank Symptoms Apply to the Iban?"
• Tanya Luhrmann, ed. Our Most Troubling Madness
• Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization.
• Erik Midelfort, “Madness and Civilization in Early Modern Europe- a Reappraisal of Michel Foucault”
• Asti Hustvedt, Medical Muses
• Henri Ellenberger, The Discovery of the Unconscious
• Rachel Aviv, “The trauma of facing deportation” 
• Richard Lloyd Parry, “Ghosts of the tsunami” 
• Daniel Mason “Rogue Wounds” 
• Bambi Chapin, “Transforming Possession: Josephine and the Work of Culture” 
• Jocelyn Marrow, “Feminine Power or Feminine Weakness?”