The Dead Fish Museum
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
A Los Angeles Times Best Book in 2009.
Set in remote cabins, asylums, Indian reservations and the streets of suburbia, the stories in The Dead Fish Museum conjure a world that is fearfully inhospitable, darkly humorous, and touched by humanity.
Charles D'Ambrosio delivers eight short works of fiction that are full of characters floating through their lives and relationships, adrift and apprehensive, tested by failure and strengthened by adversity, 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. A screenwriter fights for his sanity in a psych ward while lusting after a ballerina who sets herself ablaze. And in the magnificent title story, carpenters building sets for a porn movie drift dreamily toward an act of racial violence they will never fully comprehend.
'D'Ambrosio's powerful, minimalist prose and stories hark back to the work of Raymond Carver and Ernest Hemingway. The stories in The Dead Fish Museum are tight, spare and often haunting.' Sun Herald
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Ten years after his first collection, The Point, D'Ambrosio checks in with a gemlike set of eight stories in which wayward, self-deceiving characters set out to make order of their customary chaos and realize they are more likely to find unhappy company than catharsis. In "Screenwriter," a major Hollywood player and lifelong depressive falls in love with an elfish, self-mutilating dancer during their stay in a psych ward, where she reminds him that the mechanics of love and mental illness are similarly repetitive. In "Up North," a woman's rape at 18 is at the root of her marital infidelities. During a trip to her family's hunting lodge, her husband is wracked by the need to discover the rapist (one of her father's hunting buddies, but which?) and accept the unhappy terms of his marriage. "The Bone Game" follows Kype, the listless heir to a huge fortune made in a forgotten past, and freeloader D'Angelo as the two drive west to spread Kype's maverick grandfather's ashes. When they pick up a Native American hitchhiker and detour to her Reservation, Kype's dissipation-as-coping-mechanism takes on a harsher, and deeper, cast. D'Ambrosio's dark, intense prose drives these stories like coffin nails.
