Charles D'Ambrosio

Gathers the limited edition's 11 original essays as well as new and previously uncollected pieces in a volume that offers insight into the author's views on such subjects as Native American whaling, the work of J. D. Salinger and his own family. By the award-winning author of The Point. Original.

New & Collected Essays

Loitering

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. 25,000 first printing.

The Dead Fish Museum

Orphans

Il museo dei pesci morti

From the winner of the 1993 Aga Khan Prize for Fiction comes a literary debut that marks the arrival of a striking new voice in American fiction. 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 in the world, or of pretending that you've found one. D'Ambrosio's fictions are packed with incident and bold in narrative sweep; in richly textured and often magnificent prose, they reveal a landscape of suffering and surprising beauty, of grief and restless hope. With the publication of The Point, Charles D'Ambrosio takes his place among the most interesting and exciting writers at work today.

And Other Stories

The Point

Stories

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.

Perdersi è un libro che ci regala qualcosa di prezioso: la libertà di esplorare, il piacere di abbandonare le idee precostituite e abbracciare l’incertezza. D’Ambrosio instaura infatti un dialogo intimo con il lettore e, attraverso una prosa armoniosa ed equilibrata e uno stile geniale e frizzante, lo coinvolge in una conversazione continua con se stesso. La raccolta – che si colloca nella tradizione del New Journalism di Joan Didion e Hunter Thompson – si apre con due saggi mozzafiato ambientati a Seattle, luogo natale dell’autore, dissertazioni ironiche e decisamente folli sulla città prima che diventasse di moda, passando poi a un brillante scritto su Il giovane Holden in cui si esplora la perdita di identità. Ma che parli di una città, un personaggio o la sua stessa storia familiare, è l’isolamento il grande soggetto di D’Ambrosio che in Perdersi, attraverso il linguaggio del saggio narrativo, sfida le convinzioni mettendosi in discussione in un modo che una storia o un racconto breve non avrebbero permesso. Un esempio lucido e spettacolare di moderno romanzo.

Charles D'Ambrosio

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