What is a fuckhead?David Rawson’s Fuckhead is a surreal exploration of the literature, film, nature and expectations of disability, and of fuckheads in literature and film. Part lyric essay, part fictional memoir, Rawson’s work tells the story of an unnamed narrator whose familial relationships are defined by his VATER syndrome. Abused by his mother and stripped of a voice by his brother’s need to be Tom Cruise via Rain Man, he sets out into a universe of literary tropes.The work is particularly interested in the relationship between Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men and what the narrator argues is Denis Johnson’s reimagining of that work in the short story “Emergency” (in Johnson’s Jesus’ Son). But in accumulating characters with disabilities as widely diverse as Darth Vader, Benjy of Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury, and the TV sitcom Community’s Abed Nadir, Rawson movingly, and with wry humor, articulates the assumptions and clichés faced by persons with disabilities, all the while creating a new family with his unlikely gathering of “fuckheads.”

This book is included in DOAB.