Shelf Space - Medicine Man

In John Murray’s new collection of short stories, A Few Short Notes on Tropical Butterflies (HarperCollins), the only thing too short is the “About the Author” note in the back, which sheds precious little light on the pedigree of this talented new writer.

Australian by birth, Murray came to the U.S. in 1990 to study international health at Johns Hopkins University, later working for the Centers for Disease Control and traveling extensively. This helps explain why his stories so accurately capture obscure scientific trivia and take place in a host of exotic settings, such as the Congo and New Guinea, as well as Atlanta.

In Murray’s world, biology, entomology and medicine collide in an emotional kaleidoscope of interdependence. His characters meticulously study lifeforms in attempts to make sense of their own fragile existence, but they get lost in the drudgery of taxonomy.

“The Hill Station” finds a frigid CDC scientist leaving her Atlanta lab to study cholera in Bombay. Murray’s stomach-churning details of the disease might provoke the squeamish reader to drop the book just a few pages in — a shame, really, because the stories just get better from there.

In the title piece, the collection’s best, an alcoholic surgeon reveals how his grandfather, a 19th-century gentleman scientist, catalogued a host of undiscovered butterfly species — and later went insane. Butterflies, says one character, are a metaphor for life: “Beautiful, fleeting, fragile, incomprehensible.”

Those adjectives might equally apply to Murray’s writing, the “incomprehensible” referencing how someone trained as a health worker can make such a precise and cathartic literary debut. John Murray appears April 2 at 7 p.m. at Chapter 11 Discount Books at Emory Commons, 2091 N. Decatur Road. 404-325-1505.

Speaking of Chapter 11, the local bookstore chain is wrapping up its three-month competition soliciting submissions from local writers, which will be published in Lessons Learned, Volume I. The deadline is March 31 for the contest, co-sponsored by the Knowledge Shop Foundation and the Georgia Writers Association. For guidelines, go to a Chapter 11 location, or check out www.knowledgeshopatlanta.com.

Shelf Space is a weekly column on books and Atlanta’s literary scene.