SOURCE: "The Way We Write Now: The Reality of AIDS in Contemporary Short Fiction," in Studies in Short Fiction, Vol. 30, No. 4, Fall, 1993, pp. 491-500.

In the following essay, Warner examines several short stories by American writers as effective vehicles for communicating the social, psychological, and medical realities associated with AIDS.

She knew as much about this disease as she could know.

The line comes from "Philostorgy, Now Obscure," a short story first published in The New Yorker. Its author, Allen Barnett, died of AIDS in 1992. The "disease" the line refers to is, in fact, AIDS, and the "she" is a woman named Roxy, who asks her friend Preston whether he intends to go on DHPG. Roxy knows DHPG is a drug used to treat CMV (cytomegalovirus), and that it requires "a catheter inserted into a vein that fed directly into an atrium of his heart." Roxy has done...