The Peripatetic Coffin and Other Stories - Softcover

Rutherford, Ethan

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0062203835 ISBN 13: 9780062203830

Publisher: Ecco Press, 2013

Synopsis

Unusual book

About this title

Review:

"Rutherford's mastery of setting and world building lends these stories tangible reality... compulsively readable plots... the sweetness and strength of his characters, who face up to loss, misfortune, and heartbreak with courage and a weird kind of humor... makes these stories both resonant and rereadable."--Booklist

"[A] fine debut collection. The stories serve as compass points on a map of desolation and isolation. . . . This is a beautiful book about human suffering, about human quandaries. It is also about bravery, history, love, longing, scientific and sexual exploration."--Minneapolis Star Tribune

"Refreshingly raw . . . [Rutherford's] powerful debut presents each scenario in a humorous, reality-based manner, exploring life's various limitations and exposing the truth of its unpredictability... Rutherford reveals something painstakingly humane and beautiful in mistakes and misdirection."--Nylon Magazine

"The Peripatetic Coffin, Ethan Rutherford's debut collection of short stories, is a keeper. His work creeps up on you when you're not looking. . . . Eight masterful tales inject power, subtlety and emotion into an unforgettable cast of beleaguered, doomed characters."--Shelf Awareness

"Oh how I love these stories! Ethan Rutherford can slay you with humor and buoy you within the midst of tragedy. His range is amazing. Every story is 100% Grade-A storytelling. I bow down to The Peripatetic Coffin."--Alice Sebold, author of The Lucky Bones and Lucky

"This is a flat-out beautiful book of stories... Not all books of stories are page-turners, but this one is."--Charles Baxter, author of National Book Award finalist The Feast of Love

"Rutherford's wildly inventive collection is nothing short of a revelation.... no experience is beyond this very fine writer's ambitious grasp. He gives us the world with each story, with the world's full measure of heartbreak and hilarity."--Ben Fountain, author of National Book Award finalist Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk

"Funny and wrenching, featuring hapless fatalists who nonetheless never stop striving, even as they continue to squander opportunities. And yet they never let us forget that there's always the possibility that they will learn--even if it's the hard way--to see beyond themselves."--Jim Shepard, author of author of National Book Award finalist Like You'd Understand, Anyway

"My desert island book. The one I will always carry with me... each story is a vessel of longing and possibility; collectively, they present a mosaic of our past and our future, reinvigorating the art of storytelling... a revelatory feat of the imagination... an incomparable, vital debut."--Paul Yoon, author of Once the Shore

"Ethan Rutherford's stories are absolutely perfect. He writes with such sensitivity and clarity about how and why things come undone and fall apart. I rarely feel this close to heartbreak, this strengthened by a writer clearly doing something special"--Kevin Wilson, author of The Family Fang

From the Back Cover:

Alternately funny, menacing, and deeply empathetic, the wildly inventive stories in Ethan Rutherford's The Peripatetic Coffin mark the debut of a powerful new voice in contemporary fiction

Worried about waning enrollment, the head counselor of the world's worst summer camp leads his campers on a series of increasingly dubious escapades in an effort to revive their esprit de corps. A young boy on a sailing vacation with his father comes face-to-face with a dangerous stranger, and witnesses a wrenching act of violence. Parents estranged from their disturbed son must gird themselves for his visit, even as they cannot face each other. And in the dazzling title story, the beleaguered crew of the first Confederate submarine embarks on their final, doomed mission during the closing days of the Civil War.

Whether set aboard a Czarist-era Russian ship locked in Arctic ice, on a futuristic whaling expedition whose depredations guarantee the environmental catastrophe that is their undoing, or in a suburban basement where two grade-school friends articulate their mutual obsessions, these strange, imaginative, and refreshingly original stories explore the ways in which we experience the world: as it is, as it could be, and the dark contours that lie between.

About this edition

• Publisher: Ecco Press
• Publication date: 2013
• ISBN 10: 0062203835
• ISBN 13: 9780062203830
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 240