Pandemonium Logs: Sioux Falls, South Dakota, 2020-2022 - Paperback

by Ben Miller (Author)

Balcones Prize Winner in Nonfiction

In unsparing yet sympathetic prose, Ben Miller creates an intimate portrait of the impact of COVID on the diverse people of South Dakota. Through a wide range of characters--from understandably confused patients to quietly competent nurses--he explores the human complexities of the crisis: a doctor based in Mumbai who treats critically ill patients in the Dakotas via a tenuous hodgepodge of telehealth apparatus, a Hydra of six workplace trainers who together cannot train one employee to do one job, a vice president of corporate hospitality who lives to rip down safety signs as fast as nurses post them, a ninety-year-old hospital volunteer who pushes wheelchairs containing patients half his age.

In Pandemonium Logs, Miller provides precise and moving observations of ordinary people doing extraordinary things.

Author Biography

BEN MILLER is the author of River Bend Chronicle: The Junkification of a Boyhood Idyll amid the Curious Glory of Urban Iowa. He has published in Raritan, Salmagundi, One Story, The Georgia Review, The Southern Review, New England Review, and other journals. His essays have been reprinted or noted nine times in Best American Essays. His awards include fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Radcliffe Institute, as well as grants from the South Dakota Arts Council and the Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America. He has been a finalist for the PEN/Bellwether Prize for Socially Engaged Fiction.