Legend of a Suicide (Grace Paley Prize in Short Fiction) - Hardcover

Vann, David

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1558496726 ISBN 13: 9781558496729

Publisher: University of Massachusetts Press, 2008

Synopsis

In "Ichthyology," a young boy watches his father spiral from divorce to suicide. The story is told obliquely, often through the boy's observations of his tropical fish, yet also reveals his father's last desperate moves, including quitting dentistry for commercial fishing in the Bering Sea. "Rhoda" goes back to the beginning of the father's second marriage and the boy's fascination with his stepmother, who has one partially closed eye. This eye becomes a metaphor for the adult world the boy can't yet see into, including sexuality and despair, which feel like the key initiating elements of the father's eventual suicide. "A Legend of Good Men" tells the story of the boy's life with his mother after his father's death through the series of men she dates.

In "Sukkwan Island," an extraordinary novella, the father invites the boy homesteading for a year on a remote island in the southeastern Alaskan wilderness. As the situation spins out of control, the son witnesses his father's despair and takes matters into his own hands. In "Ketchikan," the boy is now thirty years old, searching for the origin of ruin. He tracks down Gloria, the woman his father first cheated with, and is left with the sense of "a world held in place, as it turned out, by nothing at all." Set in Fairbanks, where the author's father actually killed himself, "The Higher Blue" provides an epilogue to the collection.

About this title

From the Back Cover

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 the Author

David Vann is a professor at the University of San Francisco. He is a contributor to Esquire, The Atlantic, Men's Journal, National Geographic Adventure, The Sunday Times (London), and Outside, and author of the memoir A Mile Down: The True Story of a Disastrous Career at Sea and Last Day on Earth: A Portrait of the NIU School Shooter, Steve Kazmierczak. His latest novel is Carribou Island. His website is www.DavidVann.com.

About this edition

• Publisher: University of Massachusetts Press
• Publication date: 2008
• ISBN 10: 1558496726
• ISBN 13: 9781558496729
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 160