David Vann Collection - Epub, Mobi

David Vann Collection - Epub, Mobi

David Vann was born in the Aleutian Islands and spent his childhood in Ketchikan, Alaska.

For 12 years, no agent would send out his first book, Legend of a Suicide, so he went to sea and became a captain and boat builder. Legend of a Suicide has now won 10 prizes, including the Prix Medicis Etranger in France for best foreign novel, the Premi Llibreter in Spain for best foreign novel, the Grace Paley Prize, a California Book Award, and the L Expressreaders prize (France). Being translated into 18 languages, Legend of a Suicide is an international bestseller and has also been on 40 Best Books of the Year lists in 11 countries, been selected by the New Yorker Book Club and the Times Book Club, read in full on North German radio, and will be made into a film by Chris Meloni.

A current Guggenheim fellow and former Wallace Stegner fellow, John L'Heureux fellow, and NEA fellow, he has taught at Stanford,Cornell, FSU, and is currently a professor at the University of San Francisco.



Dirt

HarperCollins e-books (2012)
eISBN 978-0-06-212103-5

The year is 1985, and twenty-two-year-old Galen lives with his emotionally dependent mother in a secluded old house surrounded by a walnut orchard in a suburb of Sacramento. He doesn't know who his father is, his abusive grandfather is dead, and his grandmother, losing her memory, has been shipped off to a nursing home. Galen and his mother survive on the family's trust fund--old money that his aunt, Helen, and seventeen-year-old cousin, Jennifer, are determined to get their hands on.

Galen, a New Age believer who considers himself an old soul, yearns for transformation: to free himself from the corporeal, to be as weightless as air, to walk on water. But he's powerless to stop the manic binges that overtake him, leading him to fixate on forbidden desires. A prisoner of his body, he is obsessed with thoughts of the boldly flirtatious Jennifer and dreams of shedding himself of the clinging mother whose fears and needs weigh him down. When the family takes a trip to an old cabin in the Sierras, near South Lake Tahoe, tensions crescendo. Caught in a compromising position, Galen will discover the shocking truth of just how far he will go to attain the transcendence he craves.

An exhilarating portrayal of a legacy of violence and madness, Dirt is an entirely feverish read


Caribou Island

Penguin Books Ltd (2011)
eISBN: 978-0-14-193106-7

A noir novel rooted in a world of profound violence and regret, Caribou Island is an exploration of marriage and exile set against the interminable restlessness of Alaska's primal landscape.

On a small island in a glacier-fed lake on Alaska's Kenai Peninsula, Gary and Irene's marriage is unraveling. Alone now that the children are grown, Gary, driven by thirty years of diverted plans, is determined to build from scratch the cabin he has always wanted, believing it will recapture what once drew him to Alaska. Irene knows better. She suspects that the cabin is Gary's first step to leaving her.

Soon they are hauling logs out to Caribou Island in good weather and in terrible storms, in sickness and in health. But setbacks begin to create chinks in Gary's half-baked design, while Irene is stricken with mysterious headaches and troubling flashes of her tragic past. With each trip to the island their desperation escalates, and when winter comes early, the punishing desolation of the prehistoric wilderness will threaten to push Irene and Gary to the edge and end a marriage sustained by pain and rage that has been simmering for years.


Legend of a Suicide

HarperCollins e-books (2010)
eISBN: 978-0-06-198780-9

Winner of the Grace Paley Prize in Short Fiction - 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.

Enjoy!