Synopses & Reviews
In "Ichthyology", a young boy watches his father spiral from divorce to suicide. The story is told obliquely, often through the boy's observations of his tropical fish, yet also reveals his father's last desperate moves, including quitting dentistry for commercial fishing in the Bering Sea. Rhoda goes back to the beginning of the father's second marriage and the boy's fascination with his stepmother, who has one partially closed eye. This eye becomes a metaphor for the adult world the boy can't yet see into, including sexuality and despair, which feel like the key initiating elements of the father's eventual suicide.
"A Legend of Good Men" tells the story of the boy's life with his mother after his father's death through the series of men she dates. In "Sukkwan Island", an extraordinary novella, the father invites the boy home-steading for a year on a remote island in the southeastern Alaskan wilderness. As the situation spins out of control, the son witnesses his father's despair and takes matters into his own hands.
In "Ketchikan", the boy is now thirty years old, searching for the origin of ruin. He tracks down Gloria, the woman his father first cheated with, and is left with the sense of a world held in place, as it turned out, by nothing at all. Set in Fairbanks, where the author's father actually killed himself, "The Higher Blue" provides an epilogue to the collection.
Review
"This stunning collection of five short stories and a novella centers on the suicide of an Alaskan father. [O]ne of the most striking fictional debuts in recent memory." Robert Olen Butler, Pulitzer Prize-winning author
Review
“With Legend of a Suicide, Vann looks into the dark and isolated heart of the American soul. It is a devastating journey that is difficult to read but impossible to put down and equally impossible to forget.” June Sawyers, San Francisco Chronicle
Review
“The reportorial relentlessness of Vanns imagination often makes his fiction seem less written than chiseled. A small, lovely book has been written out of his large and evident pain. Tom Bissell, New York Times Book Review
Review
“The stories in Legend of a Suicide approach a private mythos, revisiting, reinvestigating, and reinventing one familys broken past. They also transport us to wild, uncharted places on the Alaskan coast and in the American soul. Throughout, David Vann is a generous, sure-handed guide in some very dangerous territory.” Stewart O'Nan, author of Songs for the Missing
Review
“A reckoning. . . . A message of profound sympathy and sadness, anger and regret, Legend of a Suicide is the melting away of one mans past and the reshaping of tragedy into art. . . . [It] journeys unflinchingly into darkness.” Greg Schutz, Fiction Writers Review
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“A powerful new voice has emerged in fiction.” Sunday Times (London)
Review
“A piece of relentless, heartbreaking brilliance that bears comparison with Cormac McCarthys The Road.” The Weekend Australian
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“A truly great writer.” Irish Sunday Independent
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“For the imagery alone and for the sentences, the book would be a treasure.” Colm Tóibín, London Observer
Review
“Extraordinary. . . . Reminiscent of Tobias Wolff, Vanns prose is as pure as a gulp of water from an Alaskan stream.” Financial Times
Review
“Headlong narrative pacing, a memorable train-wreck father who gives Richard Russos characters a run for their money, and a sure, sharp, inviting voice. So hard to put down that I am thinking of suing David Vann for several hours of lost sleep.” Lionel Shriver, author of So Much For That and The Post-Birthday World
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“David Vanns dark and strange book twists through natural forces and compressed emotions towards an extraordinary and dreamlike conclusion. One of the most gripping debuts Ive ever read.” Philip Hoare, author Leviathan, winner of the BBC Samuel Johnson Prize
Review
“Vengeful yet sorrowing and empathetic, plausible yet dreamlike, and completely absorbing.” Christopher Tayler, The Guardian
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“David Vanns extraordinary and inventive set of fictional variations on his fathers death will surely become an American classic.” The Times Literary Supplement (London)
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“The writing in these stories, informed by both the empirical and the lyrical, is heart-wrenching and gorgeous.” Lorrie Moore
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“As primal and unforgiving as the Alaskan wilds where its set.” Bret Anthony Johnston, Men's Journal
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“The book is as dark, stormy, and beautiful as the ragged Aleutian coast.” National Geographic Adventure
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“His legend is at once the truest memoir and the purest fiction. . . . Nothing quite like this book has been written before.” Alexander Linklater, London Observer
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“Brilliant . . . Vanns prose follows the sinews of Cormac McCarthy and Hemingway, yet has its own nimble flex.” The Times (London)
Review
“The most powerful, and pure, piece of writing I have read for a very long time. This book squeezes more life out of the first 100 pages than most books could manage in 1,000, which is pretty impressive, considering its a book about death.” Ross Raisin, author of Out Backward
Review
“In his portrayal of a young sons love for his lost father David Vann has created a stunning work of fiction: surprising, beautiful, and intensely moving.” Nadeem Aslam, author of Maps for Lost Lovers and The Wasted Vigil
Review
‘This is my ‘One to watch. . . . Its stunning, beautifully written, with genuine surprises and a complexity which makes you retrace your steps, wonder what really happened and ponder over the whole scenario for days. I loved it. Its Richard Yates, Annie Proulx territory, and highly recommended.” Sarah Broadhurst, The Bookseller (UK)
Review
“Make way for a terrific new voice from Alaska! McGuires short fictions are as authentic as they come—drawn from a life steeped in rural Alaska and commercial fishing, deeply imagined. Her language is luminous, and her characters—rough, innocent, tragic, fully human—are unforgettable.”
Review
“Emotional snapshots of life in coastal Alaska’s fishing communities form the focus of McGuire’s short-story compilation, The Creatures at the Absolute Bottom of the Sea. The stories juxtapose the rugged and unforgiving landscape of rocky coasts and tumultuous waters with the characters’ inner lives of love and loss. . . . McGuire herself has more than a decade of experience in the fishing industry, and this shows in the authenticity of her voice. Her characters are not scholarly or verbose but working class. They feel deeply, and directly, and she writes them with appropriate bluntness and candor.”
Review
"The Creatures at the Absolutely Bottom of the Sea is well worth seeking out. The language is beautiful, the tone is haunting, none of the stories overstay their welcome, and its melancholy but passionate love of the sea is liable to linger long after you put it down."
Review
“It’s dark work for certain, but all of it is finely crafted by McGuire’s writing. . . .In rendering the sea an inanimate entity she lends it character. By being nobody, it becomes somebody. Perfectly tuned paragraphs like this one are found throughout the book. Rarely is Alaska’s essential nature so well captured, and she does it without superlatives or clichés.”
Synopsis
In semi-autobiographical stories set largely in David Vann's native Alaska, Legend of a Suicide follows Roy Fenn from his birth on an island at the edge of the Bering Sea to his return thirty years later to confront the turbulent emotions and complex legacy of his father's suicide.
Synopsis
“The reportorial relentlessness of [David] Vanns imagination often makes his fiction seem less written than chiseled. A small, lovely book has been written out of his large and evident pain.”—
New York Times Book Review In Legend of a Suicide, his heartbreaking semi-autobiographical debut story-collection, David Vann relates the story of a young man trying to come to terms with the guilt and pain of his fathers suicide. The wild outback of the authors native Alaska acts as the ideal backdrop for this collage of six stories—a novella and five shorts—and mirrors the authors own psychological wilderness. From “an important new voice in American literature” (Robert Olen Butler, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain) comes an unforgettable exploration of the tragic gaps between one boy and his father.
Synopsis
In
The Creatures at the Absolute Bottom of the Sea, Rosemary McGuire's compelling debut short story collection, fishermen and -women cling to a life on the ocean's border. Risk and loss are habits to them, but ones that have not undermined their essential humanity--or their hearts. Their lives are rugged, full of grief and grace. No one in these stories comes through unscarred, but they still cling to the hope that comes from a belief in secular miracles.
A man witnesses a tragic accident that calls his own life into question. A young woman meets her high school sweetheart after many years, and seeks to make sense of the separate paths they've taken. And in the title story, a soldier home from Iraq tries to rebuild his life in a remote Alaskan village.
These are fishing stories, told as such stories are told: simple, violent, often coarse, but paying homage to the elemental beauty of the sea. In the end, the reader is left with a sense of the fragility and beauty of life, as it is exposed in proximity to danger and loss.
Synopsis
A man witnesses a tragic accident that calls his own life into question. A young woman meets her high school sweetheart after many years and seeks to make sense of the separate paths they've taken. A soldier home from Iraq tries to rebuild his life in a remote Alaskan village.
These are fishing stories, told as such stories are meant to be: simple, often coarse, and tinged with the elemental beauty of the sea. They reflect rugged lives lived on the edge of the ocean’s borders, where grief and grace ride the same waves. Rosemary McGuire, a fisherman herself, captures the essential humanity at the heart of each tale. No one comes through unscathed, but all retain a sense of hope and belief in earthly miracles, however humble.
A dazzling debut, The Creatures at the Absolute Bottom of the Sea will leave readers with a sense of the fragility and beauty inherent in eroded lives spent in proximity to danger.
Synopsis
In this exquisite debut novel, Mary Emerick takes readers into the watery landscape of southeast Alaska and the depths of a family in crisis.
An abusive father and a broken home forces a teenage Winnie to seek the safety of a neighboring bay and a pair of unlikely father figures. Years later her mother goes missing, and Winnie returns to the hunting and fishing lodge she grew up in to find the world she knew gone. Her once-powerful father disfigured by a bear attack. Her childhood hero revealed as merely human. And her mother’s story rewritten by a stray note.
As Winnie uses the help of friends to sort out the details of her mother’s final exodus, she finds herself pulled into a murky swirl of family secrets and devastating revelations. As the search heads higher into the mountains, Winnie must learn to depend on her own strength in order to reach the one she loves.
About the Author
David Vann is an internationally bestselling author whose work has been translated into nineteen languages. He is the winner of fifteen prizes, including Frances Prix Médicis étranger, Spains Premi Llibreter, the Grace Paley Prize, a California Book Award, the AWP Nonfiction Prize, and Frances Prix des lecteurs de LExpress. His books—Legend of a Suicide, Caribou Island, Dirt, A Mile Down, and Last Day on Earth—have appeared on seventy best books of the year lists in a dozen countries. A former Guggenheim fellow, Wallace Stegner fellow, John LHeureux fellow, and National Endowment for the Arts fellow, he is a professor at the University of Warwick in England. He has written for the Atlantic, Esquire, Outside, Mens Journal, McSweeneys, the Sunday Times, the Observer, the Sunday Telegraph, and many others, and he has appeared in documentaries for the BBC, Nova, National Geographic, and CNN.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgements
Prologue
The Lost Boys Longtime Co.
The Murder
Easter, Thompsen’s Bay
Innocence
Angel Hotch
Dutch Harbor, New Year’s Eve
Snow Night on the Richardson
Luke
Thompsen’s Bay
The Vega
The Day We Went Down to Chalkyitik
Daniel, Kodiak
The Creature at the Absolute Bottom of the Sea