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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.… (more)
User reviews
This is the first I’ve ever read anything by D’Ambrosio. His writing is poetic and technically stunning with some of the most amazing metaphors I can ever remember reading in a book of short stories (A bite taken out of an apple “turned brown like an old laugh; black leather buttons on a cardigan look like “a baby’s withered navel”), but it’s not a book to read if you’re in a bad mood. Some are very dark and disturbing in tone, but every story in the collection resonates. His fusions of character and setting are just astonishing. This one is vying for my best read short story collection of 2006, right next to Amy Hempel, Alice Munro and Maeve Brennan. I don’t know if I’ll be able to pick one over the other two, each is so different from the other(although a case could me made that Hempel and D’Ambrosio cover the same territory) and affected me in their own distinct way.
Discovering writers like D’Ambrosio keep my reading juices flowing. Just when I think I’m bored with my reading selections and nothing seems to really impress or shock me, along comes a book like this. This is the book I'm pimping on everyone for the rest of the year.
My favorite stories from the collection - "The Scheme of Things," "Up North,"