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A must read for everyone who cares about literary writing, The Dead Fish Museum belongs on the same shelf with the best American short fiction.
Knopf
April 2006
256 pages ISBN: 1400042860 Hardcover
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Fiction
"In the fall, I went for walks and brought home bones.
The best bones weren't on trails--deer and moose don't die
conveniently--and soon I was wandering so far into the woods
that I needed a map and compass to find my way home. When
winter came and snow blew into the mountains, burying the
bones, I continued to spend my days and often my nights in
the woods. I vaguely understood that I was doing this
because I could no longer think; I found relief in walking
up hills. When the night temperatures dropped below zero, I
felt visited by necessity, a baseline purpose, and I walked
for miles, my only objective to remain upright, keep moving,
preserve warmth. When I was lost, I told myself stories . .
." So Charles D'Ambrosio recounted his life in Philipsburg,
Montana, the genesis of the brilliant stories collected
here, six of which originally appeared in The New Yorker.
Each of these eight burnished, terrifying, masterfully
crafted stories is set against a landscape that is both
deeply American and unmistakably universal. A son confronts his father's madness and his own hunger for
connection on a misguided hike in the Pacific Northwest. A
screenwriter fights for his sanity in the bleak corridors of
a Manhattan psych ward while lusting after a ballerina who
sets herself ablaze. A Thanksgiving hunting trip in Northern
Michigan becomes the scene of a haunting reckoning with
marital infidelity and desperation. And in the magnificent
title story, carpenters building sets for a porn movie drift
dreamily beneath a surface of sexual tension toward a racial
violence they will never fully comprehend. Taking place in remote cabins, asylums, Indian reservations,
the backloads of Iowa and the streets of Seattle, this
collection of stories, as muscular and challenging as the
best novels, is about people who have been orphaned, who
have lost connection, and who have exhausted the ability to
generate meaning in their lives. Yet in the midst of
lacerating difficulty, the sensibility at work in these
fictions boldly insists on the enduring power of love.
D'Ambrosio conjures a world that is fearfully inhospitable,
darkly humorous, and touched by glory; here are characters,
tested by every kind of failure, who struggle to remain
human, whose lives have been sharpened rather than numbed by
adversity, whose apprehension of truth and beauty has been
deepened rather than defeated by their troubles. Many
writers speak of the abyss. Charles D'Ambrosio writes as if
he is inside of it, gazing upward, and the gaze itself is
redemptive, a great yearning ache, poignant and wondrous,
equal parts grit and grace.
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