The Nostalgia Echo by Mickey Hess

Nostalgia is coming back around. A professional narrator named Gene is searching for his birth mother, armed with nothing but a Polaroid photograph of her at a 1976 book release party for Dr. Everett Barnes’ Nostalgia: Its Origins and Attributes. Dr. Barnes, meanwhile, is about to become famous for a book he wrote thirty years ago. Nostalgia – once considered a potentially-fatal disease when it was first diagnosed in the 17th century – has been relegated to the realm of the sentimental, but based on Dr. Barnes’ theories, people are beginning to reconsider its dangerous effects: doctors return to the old cures; pharmaceutical companies solicit Dr. Barnes to endorse the new anti-nostalgic medications they have developed; and Gene seeks out Dr. Barnes to somehow realign the missing pieces of his past into a story with a beginning, middle, and ending. With wit and humor, The Nostalgia Echo presents a revealing look at the problem of progress--that moving forward often means leaving something behind.