The Dead Fish Museum

How was I supposed to know that any mention of suicide to the phalanx of doctors making Friday rounds would warrant the loss of not only weekend-pass privileges but also the liberty to take a leak in private?

In The Dead Fish Museum Charles D'Ambrosio delivers eight short stories full of characters who float through their lives and relationships, adrift and apprehensive, tested by failure and strengthened by adversity.

D'Ambrosio's stories are 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. A screenwriter fights for his sanity in a psych ward while lusting after a ballerina who sets herself ablaze. A hunting trip 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 toward an act of racial violence they will never fully comprehend.

Set in remote cabins, asylums, Indian reservations and the streets of suburbia, this collection conjures a world that is fearfully inhospitable, darkly humorous, and touched by humanity.