SOUTH EIGHT by Larry Atlas - Spotlight & Giveaway

 

Larry Atlas has dipped his feet in many challenges over his life. His latest endeavour, author. SOUTH EIGHT (WebatuckPress) is his debut novel.

The emotionally-charged story of South Eight follows a young doctor’s collision with the demands and contradictions of modern acute care medicine, both its power and failings, and the moral questions it ultimately provokes.

For Dr. Abel Arkin, those questions reach back to his time as the spotter on an Army sniper team in Afghanistan, when the clarity of his training and skills converged with the uncertainty of mission outcomes and personal trauma. The old dilemmas and doubts join those of the present when a newly arrived patient tries to blackmail him with the threatened exposure of a wartime catastrophe, and simultaneously underlines Arkin’s increasing ambivalence about what he is actually accomplishing for his patients, what may be missing from the life-and-death calculations he makes everyday. In pitch-perfect language, Atlas builds suspense not simply around a disturbing medical and professional dilemma, but in troubling questions of individual trust and conviction. Both a literary mystery and love story, South Eight is also a piercing exploration of the reality of modern medicine, one with important insights for doctors and nurses, as well as for the patients they treat. Which is to say, for all of us.motion

After serving in the Army as a Drill Sergeant, Larry Atlas attended Bennington College, earning both bachelors and masters degrees before declining admission to medical school — and moving to New York to begin a career as an actor, playwright, and screenwriter. Among his produced plays are Total Abandon and the award winning Yield of the Long Bond. 

He worked on more than twenty studio screenplay projects including Sleepless in Seattle. He conceived and implemented the first nationwide online actors’ casting service, and then later co-invented and patented the first navigable nonlinear video architecture. He wrote and directed the first video feature using this technology, The Onyx Project, starring David Strathairn.

In midlife, on impulse, he went to nursing school, then worked for four years as an acute care nurse while earning a masters degree as a nurse practitioner at SUNY Stony Brook. He worked for a decade as a hospitalist NP and now practices at a subacute rehab. He has taught at Hunter, Bennington, and Vassar colleges, and is former captain of the skydiving team Spaced Rangers.