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.
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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.
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.
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Book Description Hardcover. Condition: New. Dust Jacket Condition: New. 1st Edition. Amherst: (2008). First edition. First printing. Hardbound. New/New. A pristine unread copy (without marks or bruises or smells or any other defect). Comes with archival-quality mylar dust jacket cover (not clipped, of course). Shipped in well-padded box. Purchased new and never opened. Second state jacket, with NY TIMES BOOK REVIEW on rear cover. Seller Inventory # 10-2015-113
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Book Description Hardcover. Condition: New. Dust Jacket Condition: New. 1st Edition. Amherst, Mass.: University of Massachusetts Press, 2008. First edition. First printing. Hardbound. New/New. A pristine unread copy, very fine in all respects. This is the first-state dust jacket, with the PUBLISHERS WEEKLY blurb on the back cover (not the New York Times Book Review blurb). Comes with mylar dust jacket protector. SIGNED BY AUTHOR on title page. Shipped in sturdy box. Smoke-free shop. (No smells, bruises, defects of any sort.) Winner of the AWP Grace Paley Prize for Fiction, 2007. His first book, a collection of stories. Winner of the California Book Award, Silver Medal in First Fiction. New York Times Editors' Choice and Notable Books of 2008. Tiny first printing. David Vann won France's 2010 Prix Medicis etranger for SUKKWAN ISLAND, published in the U.S. as a novella along with the stories in LEGEND OF A SUICIDE. His first novel, is CARIBOU ISLAND (published in January 2011). 0.0. Signed by Author(s). Seller Inventory # 1110-223