Infinitely Complex

Infinitely Complex: Short Stories About Mental Illness, Addiction, Alcoholism, Bigotry, and Veterans is a collection of twenty-two short stories about broken people. They specifically delve into various psychiatric diseases, including schizophrenia, depression, post-traumatic stress disorder, and bipolar disorder; and the ravages of alcoholism and addiction. Veteran’s issues are emphasized, to include service-related disability compensation. The author also tackles present-day topics: undocumented immigrants, racism, threats to our democracy, and clash of cultures. Millions in the United States struggle with mental illness, including veterans and their dependents. The stories will also resonate with people suffering from alcoholism and drug addiction, undocumented immigrants living in fear, and people experiencing the cultural divide.

About the Author

Rick Williams served in the Army from 1969 to 1971, including thirteen months at the 3rd Surgical Army Hospital (MASH) in Binh Thuy, Vietnam, as a medical corpsman in the intensive care unit. He was also a physician assistant (PA) with New York City Prison Health Services (Rikers Island) and the Department of Veterans Affairs Medical Center, New Orleans, in the psychiatry service. His later professional experience was as a lawyer and judge with the Board of Veterans Appeals in Washington, D.C., during which he authored over 10,000 appellate opinions. Following his retirement from law, Williams authored an overview of veterans treatment courts in Glimpses of the New Veteran (Carolina Academic Press, 2015). Switching to creative writing, his short stories, “The Girl in the Oxygen Tent” and “Why Was Jesus Laughing?” were published by the Deadly Writers Patrol (Spring 2018 and Spring 2021 issues), and “A Lamp Unto His Feet”, published by Flash Fiction Magazine in March 2023. Williams’s thirteen short stories with color photographs of eighteen of his portraits of veterans appear in Seeing the Light, published by Poets-Choice and available for purchase on www.barnesandnoble.com. Williams participated in the University of Iowa’s summer Creative Writers’ Workshop in 2019. Rick resides in Bethesda, Maryland; Buffalo, New York; and Cuernavaca, Morelos, Mexico.