Charles D'Ambrosio
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The Dead Fish Museum: Stories
Charles D'Ambrosio
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.
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.
Charles D'Ambrosio
Charles D’Ambrosio’s work is full of light and humor even in its darkest visions: these are stories of sorrow and mercy, of people struggling to wrest meaning from the tragedies that hover over their lives. All have reached a point from which there can be no true return, and it is in this moment of destruction and renewal—with the world they’ve known collapsing eerily behind them—that D’Ambrosio’s characters begin their perilous crossing from knowledge into forgiveness.
The wise-beyond-his-years narrator of the title story guides a drunk woman home along the beach and confronts the violent legacy of his father’s suicide. In “Her Real Name,” a young man navigates the tired and forgotten allegory of the American West and manages a moment of ceremonial dignity as he buries a young girl at sea. In “Jacinta,” a woman mourns her baby girl, who drowned in a tub of water left behind by evening rain. “American Bullfrog” and “Open House” are unforgettable stories of self-discovery and loss, detailing with simplicity and grace the loneliness of looking for a home…
