Visits from the Drowned Girl (Signed First Edition)

Steven Sherrill

ISBN 10: 1400061520 / ISBN 13: 9781400061525

Published by Random House, 2004

About this Item

New York: Random House [2004]. First edition. First printing. Hardbound. NEW, in dust jacket, very fine in all respects. A pristine unread copy. SIGNED BY AUTHOR on title page. Comes with archival-quality mylar dust jacket protector at no extra cost. 0.0.

Seller Inventory # new15

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Visits from the Drowned Girl (Signed First Edition)
• Publisher: Random House
• Publication Date: 2004
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1400061520
• ISBN 13: 9781400061525
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition: F.
• Dust Jacket Condition: Dust Jacket Included
• Signed: Signed by Author(s)

About this title

Synopsis

Benny Poteat is, among other things, a tower jockey, his life defined by up or down. Working hundreds of feet in the air repairing tension lines and replacing burned-out lightbulbs, he observes the world from above.

Benny has seen a lot of things from this vantage point, but nothing can compare to watching a girl die. She approaches the river that snakes far below him, sets up a video camera, and walks purposefully into the rushing water, never to reappear. Startled at both what he’s witnessed and his inability to prevent it, Benny hurries down the tower to the scene of her death. What he does next will forever alter the course of his life: He does nothing. He gathers up the drowned girl’s belongings and doesn’t tell a soul what he saw.

Instead, Benny visits the address on a business card he finds in the drowned girl’s bag and slowly insinuates himself into the life she once lived. But even as he immerses himself in her world, he wonders: What does it mean to watch someone die? And what can explain his strange attraction to the drowned girl?

Through a labyrinth of rationalization and denial, Benny struggles to figure out who to tell and what to do, until it becomes not only impractical but truly impossible for him to ever reveal his secret, the burden of which soon becomes unbearable.

Visits from the Drowned Girl is a tale about the seductive but ultimately pernicious nature of secrecy. We are all voyeurs, to one degree or another. The question is, at what point do we become responsible for the things we see?

About the Author

STEVEN SHERRILL is an assistant professor of English at Penn State Altoona. He earned an MFA in poetry from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and received a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship for Fiction in 2002. His poems and stories have appeared in The Best American Poetry, The Kenyon Review, River Styx, and The Georgia Review, among others. He is the author of The Minotaur Takes a Cigarette Break. He lives in Pennsylvania.