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), which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.  His work has been translated into 28 languages, awarded a 2021 Guggenheim Fellowship, the Joyce Carol Oates Prize, the California Book Award, the Northern California Book Award, and a Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts.  The Piano Tuner was produced as an opera by Music Theatre Wales for the Royal Opera House in London, and adapted to the stage by Lifeline Theatre in Chicago.  His short stories and essays have appeared in The Atlantic, Harper’s, Zoetrope: All Story, Zyzzyva, Narrative, and Lapham’s Quarterly, and have been awarded a Pushcart Prize, a National Magazine Award and an O. Henry Prize. An 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: Carrie Neill, Penguin Random House,  cneill@penguinrandomhouse.com

Interviews
Reading, Courses and Syllabi
PSYC82:  
​THE LITERATURE OF PSYCHOSIS
Academic Psychiatry:  Literature and the Psychotic Experience

Syllabus:
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?”