The Dead Fish Museum: Stories (Washington State Book Award) (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9781400077939)

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.

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.

Author: Charles D'Ambrosio
ISBN-10: 1400077931
ISBN-13: 9781400077939
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Language: English
Published: 04/10/2007
Pages: 256
Format: Paperback
Weight: 0.60lbs
Size: 8.02h x 5.30w x 0.65d
Award: Washington State Book Award - Winner

Review Citation(s):
New York Times 05/13/2007 pg. 32