Call Me Ahab: A Short Story Collection (The Raz/Shumaker Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Fiction) - Softcover

Finger, Anne

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0803225334 ISBN 13: 9780803225336

Publisher: Bison Books, 2009

Synopsis

Imagine a Hollywood encounter between Helen Keller and Frida Kahlo, 'two female icons of disability'. Or the story of 'Moby Dick, or, The Leg', told from Ahab's perspective. What if Vincent Van Gogh resided in a twentieth-century New York hotel, surviving on food stamps and direct communications with God? Or if the dwarf pictured in a seventeenth-century painting by Velazquez should tell her story? And, finally, imagine the encounter between David and Goliath from the Philistine's point of view. These are the characters who people history and myths as counterpoints to the 'normal'. And they are also the characters who populate Anne Finger's remarkable short stories. Affecting but never sentimental, ironic but never cynical, these wonderfully rich and comic tales re-imagine life beyond the margins of 'normality'.

About this title

Product Description

What if Vincent Van Gogh resided in a twentieth-century New York hotel, surviving on food stamps and direct communications with God? And imagine the encounter between David and Goliath from the Philistine's point of view. This book presents a collection of short stories that re-imagine life beyond the margins of 'normality'.

Review

"Call Me Ahab intricately embroiders vivid new lives for a range of characters from art and literature whose stories we think we already know. Captain Ahab, Goliath, Vincent Van Gogh, Helen Keller, Frida Kahlo, the dwarf from a Velazquez painting, and Shakespeare's Gloucester all magically shift shapes, eras, and places in Anne Finger's astonishing and stirring prose. These elegant stories rewrite the lives of the unusually embodied, imbuing them with magic and depth to show us how we collectively misrecognize what it means to inhabit a body that looks and works apart from the ordinary." --Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, author of Extraordinary Bodies

"An Anne Finger story is unlike any other. In the stories of Call Me Ahab she magically combines fact and fiction, imaginatively re-creating the context of how we understand and look at our bodies, as well as how we look at literature, the stories we tell. This book is entertaining, illuminating, and necessary." --Kenny Fries, author of Body, Remember: Memoir and The History of My Shoes and The Evolution of Darwin's Theory

Edition details

• Publisher: Bison Books
• Publication date: 2009
• ISBN 10: 0803225334
• ISBN 13: 9780803225336
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 206