Legend of a Suicide: Stories - Softcover

Vann, David

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0061875848 ISBN 13: 9780061875847

Publisher: Harper Perennial, 2010

Synopsis

In semiautobiographical stories set largely in David Vann's native Alaska, Legend of a Suicide follows Roy Fenn from his birth on an island at the edge of the Bering Sea to his return thirty years later to confront the turbulent emotions and complex legacy of his father's suicide.

About this title

About the Author

Published in twenty languages, David Vann's internationally bestselling books have won fifteen prizes, including best foreign novel in France and Spain, and have appeared on seventy-five Best Books of the Year lists in a dozen countries. He's written for the New York Times, Atlantic, Esquire, Outside, Sunset, Men's Journal, McSweeney's, and many other publications, and he has been a Guggenheim, Stegner, and NEA fellow.

Review

“The reportorial relentlessness of Vann’s imagination often makes his fiction seem less written than chiseled. A small, lovely book has been written out of his large and evident pain. (Tom Bissell, New York Times Book Review)

“With Legend of a Suicide, Vann looks into the dark and isolated heart of the American soul. It is a devastating journey that is difficult to read but impossible to put down and equally impossible to forget.” (June Sawyers, San Francisco Chronicle)

“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, author of Songs for the Missing)

“Headlong narrative pacing, a memorable train-wreck father who gives Richard Russo’s characters a run for their money, and a sure, sharp, inviting voice. So hard to put down that I am thinking of suing David Vann for several hours of lost sleep.” (Lionel Shriver, author of So Much For That and The Post-Birthday World)

“His legend is at once the truest memoir and the purest fiction. . . . Nothing quite like this book has been written before.” (Alexander Linklater, London Observer)

“The writing in these stories, informed by both the empirical and the lyrical, is heart-wrenching and gorgeous.” (Lorrie Moore)

“Brilliant . . . Vann’s prose follows the sinews of Cormac McCarthy and Hemingway, yet has its own nimble flex.” (The Times (London))

“Vengeful yet sorrowing and empathetic, plausible yet dreamlike, and completely absorbing.” (Christopher Tayler, The Guardian)

“As primal and unforgiving as the Alaskan wilds where it’s set.” (Bret Anthony Johnston, Men's Journal)

“David Vann’s extraordinary and inventive set of fictional variations on his father’s death will surely become an American classic.” (The Times Literary Supplement (London))

About this edition

• Publisher: Harper Perennial
• Publication date: 2010
• ISBN 10: 0061875848
• ISBN 13: 9780061875847
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 272