If you've ever owned a sailboat or had a friend who did, you know how it begins: with a dream. You dream about the ship, and gradually the dream consumes you. Practical considerations lose all meaning ... until, inevitably, the dream morphs into a nightmare. David Vann is familiar with that nightmare. His begins in Turkey: a thirty-year-old tourist, he stumbles across the steel frame of a ninety-foot sailboat that cries out to be built. From friends, family, and credit cards, he borrows the 150,000 to construct the ship. The Turkish builders take shameless advantage of him, eventually...
If you've ever owned a sailboat or had a friend who did, you know how it begins: with a dream. You dream about the ship, and gradually the dream consu...
"The reportorial relentlessness of David] 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."--New York Times Book Review
In Legend of a Suicide, his heartbreaking semi-autobiographical debut story-collection, David Vann relates the story of a young man trying to come to terms with the guilt and pain of his father's suicide. The wild outback of the author's native Alaska acts as the ideal backdrop for this collage of six stories--a novella and five shorts--and mirrors...
"The reportorial relentlessness of David] Vann's imagination often makes his fiction seem less written than chiseled. A small, lovely book has bee...
"Dazzling.... Vann knows the darkness but he writes from the compassionate light of art. This is an essential book." --Robert Olen Butler, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain
"Exceptional....An unflinching portrait of bad faith and bad dreams." --Ron Rash, author of Burning Bright
Set against the backdrop of Alaska's unforgiving wilderness, Caribou Island is David Vann's dark and captivating tale of a marriage pulled apart by rage and regret. With this eagerly anticipated debut novel, a masterful follow-up to...
"Dazzling.... Vann knows the darkness but he writes from the compassionate light of art. This is an essential book." --Robert Olen Butler, Pulitzer Pr...
Twenty-two-year-old Galen lives with his emotionally dependent mother in a secluded house outside Sacramento, surviving on the family's trust fund--money that his aunt, Helen, and seventeen-year-old cousin, Jennifer, are determined to get their hands on. A New Age believer who considers himself an old soul, Galen yearns for transformation but is powerless to stop the manic binges that overtake him. He dreams of shedding his clinging mother and is obsessed with thoughts of the boldly flirtatious Jennifer. But when the family takes a trip to a...
New York Times Editor's Choice
Twenty-two-year-old Galen lives with his emotionally dependent mother in a secluded house outside Sac...
On Valentine's Day 2008, Steve Kazmierczak killed five and wounded eighteen at Northern Illinois University, then killed himself. But he was an A student, a Deans' Award winner. How could this happen?
CNN could not get the story. The Chicago Tribune, Washington Post, and all others came up empty because Steve's friends and professors knew very little. He had reinvented himself in his final five years. But David Vann, investigating for Esquire, went back to Steve's high school and junior high friends, found a life perfectly shaped for mass murder, and gained full access...
On Valentine's Day 2008, Steve Kazmierczak killed five and wounded eighteen at Northern Illinois University, then killed himself. But he was an A s...
In David Vann's searing novel Goat Mountain, an 11-year-old boy at his family's annual deer hunt is eager to make his first kill. His father discovers a poacher on the land, a 640-acre ranch in Northern California, and shows him to the boy through the scope of his rifle. With this simple gesture, tragedy erupts, shattering lives irrevocably.
In prose devastating and beautiful in its precision, David Vann creates a haunting and provocative novel that explores our most primal urges and beliefs, the bonds of blood and religion that define and secure us, and the...
In David Vann's searing novel Goat Mountain, an 11-year-old boy at his family's annual deer hunt is eager to make his first kill. His fath...
