K.W. Oxnard’s The Leg in Question is a collection of fifteen stories exploring the strange, unsettling, and often darkly funny ways our bodies can betray us. Moving from post-World War I New York to pandemic-era Savannah, from Maine to Malaysia, the collection brings doctors and patients together at the uneasy intersection of medicine, mortality, obsession and desire.
Oxnard’s fiction has appeared in Story, Columbia Journal Online, Tahoma Literary Review and elsewhere. Her story “Belle of the Ball” won the 2024 Tennessee Williams & New Orleans Literary Festival Fiction Contest, and her work has been recognized by the Thomas Wolfe Fiction Prize, CRAFT Flash Fiction Contest and other awards.
For My Reading Life, Oxnard spoke with Debutiful about the books and writers that have shaped her as a reader and writer.
What was the first book you were obsessed with as a child?
Seven-year-old me could not let go of The Blue Fairy Book by Andrew Lang, an 1889 anthology full of dark, delicious fairy tales from around the world. Despite bedtime warnings from my parents, I smuggled it under the covers and read by flashlight for hours upon end, scaring myself to pieces.
What book helped you through puberty?
Like nearly every daughter of the 1970s, I lived for Judy Blume novels. I skipped school to inhale Forever, and the post-reading exegesis of sex scenes with my girlfriends was nearly as fun as the novel itself. No one writes more compassionately about and for teens than Judy.
What book do you wish 16-year-old you had read?
If A.S. Byatt’s Possession had come out during that time, I’d have hoovered it up along with anything else by her. Her prose reads like poetry, and the intimacy of voice she achieves with her characters inspires and intimidates me in equal measures.
If you were to teach a class on Damn Good Writing, what books would make the syllabus?
I could write about this for pages! Zora Neal Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God should be studied for so many reasons, including her gripping and scientifically accurate portrayal of a lowcountry hurricane. I’m terribly fond of Robertson Davies, a Canadian novelist whose literary page-turners combine his various careers and passions: the dramatic tension of theater, the precision of journalism and the psychological insights of Jungian theory. Jane Austen remains the funniest caricaturist of all time, and Flannery O’Connor’s gothic take on small southern stories lends them universal appeal. And both Ray Bradbury and Nadine Gordimer weren’t afraid to tackle big political subjects through the lens of very flawed human characters.
What books helped guide you while writing your book?
Because my collection of short fiction, The Leg in Question, explores the ways our bodies and minds betray us, I sought out books with similar themes. Bill Bryson’s extraordinary The Body: A Guide for Occupants delivered much-needed facts and welcomed me into the marvel that is the human body. Roald Dahl’s 1953 macabre book of short fiction, Someone Like You, haunted me as I built and shaped my own collection. And Dr. Oliver Sacks’ A Leg to Stand On, a memoir of his own journey as an invalid after tumbling down a Welsh mountain, immersed me in the helplessness and alienation of being a patient.
What books are on your nightstand now?
So, so many! Recent reads include: Mouth by Kerry Donoghue, a rip-roaring, take-no-prisoners collection of short stories about desire; Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel Never Let Me Go, more confirmation of his brilliance with voice and pacing; the new nonfiction book A Marriage at Sea by Sophie Elmhirst, which both horrified and thrilled me in its unflinching portrait of partnership and resilience in the face of disaster; and Percival Everett’s James, which broke my heart and stunned me with its ambition.
Up next: The Acid Queen by Susannah Cahalan, a biography of Timothy Leary’s unsung wife and amanuensis; Carmen Maria Machado’s collection of stories Her Body and Other Parties, which so many friends have recommended; Scorched Grace, a saucy mystery about a punk rocker nun solving murders in New Orleans by Margot Douaihy; Day, the latest novel from Michael Cunningham that spans the Covid era; and How to Read a Book, a novel of guilt and redemption set in my former home state, Maine, by Monica Wood.