Max ─ It Should Only Be

It's the 1980s. Max is a 40-something neurosurgeon with a secret: he has discovered a way to induce suicide in laboratory rats. And now he's going to track down the band of Nazis who killed his father, and make them the first human subjects of his new technique. That is, if he is able to navigate his Compulsive Bibliophilia Disorder, which is tearing down his New York City apartment from the inside, his sexual obsession with frizzy-haired, denim-clad student social workers called Arlene, his supremely attractive Aunt Florence, and his Penile Paradox, which kicks in as soon as he encounters any woman he considers unattainable.

Revenge, loss and frustrated desire are never far out of the picture in this darkly comic tale of one man's journey to oblivion.

Peter Berczeller was born in Austria in 1931. He spent part of his childhood in France, after the Nazi takeover of his native country. ?Before his retirement, he was a practicing internist in New York City for 32 years. He is currently Clinical Professor of Medicine at the New York University School of Medicine. He lives with his wife and dog in the Dordogne, in France.?

His book,?Doctors and Patients: What We Feel About You?(Macmillan) gathered favorable notice, notably in the?New York Times Sunday Book Review. He has also recently published a memoir,?The Little White Coat, in German translation in Vienna.