Field Guide to Falling Ill
Essays
Published on 24. March 2026
Book
Hardback
256 pages
978-0-300-28294-8 (ISBN)
Description
From the inaugural winner of the Yale Nonfiction Book Prize, a riveting exploration of illness and medicine that imagines a more humane form of care
"What was wrong with them? That's what we wanted to know." So begins Jonathan Gleason's prizewinning collection of essays on the human lives behind the corporate, legal, and cultural practices that shape disease. Drawing on his experiences as a medical interpreter and patient, Gleason illuminates a stunning range of topics, including the racial dimensions of organ donation, the past and present of the AIDS crisis, and the troubled relationship between state violence and mental illness. With sharp analysis and boundless empathy, Gleason shows how medicine is shaped by cultural narratives, historical contexts, and the complicated people who practice it.
In her foreword, Meghan O'Rourke, judge of the Yale Nonfiction Book Prize, writes that "illness is often framed as a crisis to endure or overcome. But as Gleason's work reminds us, illness is also a way of knowing. His essays speak to the precarious beauty of that knowing, and to the ways it connects us-to history, to culture, to one another."
"What was wrong with them? That's what we wanted to know." So begins Jonathan Gleason's prizewinning collection of essays on the human lives behind the corporate, legal, and cultural practices that shape disease. Drawing on his experiences as a medical interpreter and patient, Gleason illuminates a stunning range of topics, including the racial dimensions of organ donation, the past and present of the AIDS crisis, and the troubled relationship between state violence and mental illness. With sharp analysis and boundless empathy, Gleason shows how medicine is shaped by cultural narratives, historical contexts, and the complicated people who practice it.
In her foreword, Meghan O'Rourke, judge of the Yale Nonfiction Book Prize, writes that "illness is often framed as a crisis to endure or overcome. But as Gleason's work reminds us, illness is also a way of knowing. His essays speak to the precarious beauty of that knowing, and to the ways it connects us-to history, to culture, to one another."
Reviews / Votes
"A stunning debut. Gleason renders the many vulnerabilities of the body with exquisite prose and probing intelligence. I kept asking myself how a book about illness could be so pleasurable to read-the answer is that it was written with a profoundly humane and relentless curiosity, belief that no amount of suffering precludes beauty."-Melissa Febos, bestselling author of The Dry Season"Queer, lucid and brilliant, Jonathan Gleason's prose is not just a guide for falling ill but for navigating-and changing-our ableist society. Vulnerable and poetic, this is a stunning literary debut from an important new author."-Steven W. Thrasher, author of The Viral Underclass and The Overseer Class
"Field Guide to Falling Ill is an authoritative, well-wrought, and consistently surprising collection from an unexpected narrator. Gleason's articulation of life as a young gay man exploring the aftermath of the AIDS epidemic is riveting."-Kerry Howley, author of Bottoms Up and the Devil Laughs
"Jonathan Gleason's Field Guide to Falling Ill powerfully expands our understanding of illness, laying bare the intimate and often wrenching human stories interwoven with the practice of medicine. This collection is not just a chronicle of ailments but a meditation on the fragility and resilience of the human body, as well as a map traversing medicine's treacherous domains and complex histories."-John D'Agata, coauthor of The Lifespan of a Fact
More details
Series
Language
English
Place of publication
United States
Product notice
Cloth over boards
Dimensions
Height: 221 mm
Width: 149 mm
Thickness: 26 mm
Weight
425 gr
ISBN-13
978-0-300-28294-8 (9780300282948)
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Schweitzer Classification
Persons
Jonathan Gleason is an award-winning writer and a lecturer at the University of Chicago, where he teaches creative writing. Meghan O'Rourke is the judge for the Yale Nonfiction Book Prize, editor of the Yale Review, and the author of The Invisible Kingdom: Reimagining Chronic Illness.