The Dead Fish Museum
Books / Paperback
Books › Fiction › Short Stories (single author)
ISBN: 1400077931 / Publisher: Vintage, April 2007
In eight unforgettable stories, five of which previously appeared in The New Yorker, a son confronts his father's madness during a camping trip, two drifters share a ghostly vision of a young girl lost in an Iowa cornfield, a young writer battles for his sanity in a hospital psych ward, and more. By the author of The Point. Reprint. 10,000 first printing.
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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.
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