New York Times Magazine contributing writer Melanie Thernstrom, author of The Dead Girl and Halfway Heaven, is up from her Portland-area home with an arresting book on chronic pain, The Pain Chronicles: Cures, Myths, Mysteries, Prayers, Diaries, Brain Scans, Healing and the Science of Suffering (Farrar, Straus & Giroux). "Chronic pain is the Wild West of medicine. In The Pain Chronicles, Melanie Thernstrom navigates this territory—its history, its evolution, and its always shifting frontiers—with keen intelligence and insight. She shares her own story in order to illuminate a narrative of pain that is becoming more and more a national narrative. Thernstrom never flinches in the face of a subject that is easily overlooked or judged by those for whom it is, ironically, too painful. This is stellar work." - Alice Sebold. "The Pain Chronicles is scholarly, lyrical, and humane, and will give tremendous comfort to those who are in pain and those who hope to understand them." - Andrew Solomon.