Legend of a Suicide (Awp Award Series in Short Fiction) - Hardcover

Vann, David

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1558496726 ISBN 13: 9781558496729

Publisher: University of Massachusetts Press, 2008

Synopsis

Set mostly in the wilds of Alaska, these stories take on the shifting legend of a lost father. 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. Winner of the Grace Paley Prize in Short Fiction.

About this title

Review:

"As the title suggests, the stories in Legend of a Suicide approach a private mythos, revisiting, reinvestigating, and reinventing one family's 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 "The characters in these stories are extreme in their isolation from one another, whether they come together in a howling wind or in the comforts of a warm kitchen. Here is suicide, infidelity, madness; here are people whose skewed optimism about the next love affair, the next career, the next homestead, proves deadly. . . . Memory, affection for place, the mangled ways we manage to express the love we feel--David Vann is unafraid of the weight and the complication of these things. He is emboldened in these stories to fall headlong into the disorienting wilderness of the human heart and mind." -- Noy Holland

About the Author:

DAVID VANN is assistant professor of English at Florida State University. A contributor to Esquire, The Atlantic Monthly, Men's Journal, and Outside, he is author of a best-selling memoir, A Mile Down: The True Story of a Disastrous Career at Sea, and recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship and Wallace Stegner Fellowship.

About this edition

• Publisher: University of Massachusetts Press
• Publication date: 2008
• ISBN 10: 1558496726
• ISBN 13: 9781558496729
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 160