The Higher Blue: A Short Story from Legend of a Suicide
About this ebook
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.
Vann reconstructs these disjointed domestic encounters across unfurnished rooms and northern cold, observing a faltering dentist who masks financial panic and divorce behind impulsive culinary schemes.
The collection anchors Roy's recollections in stark physical realities, contrasting a kitchen on a paper-birch ridge with the solitary granite marker planted in seaside wild grass.
- Unreliable Narrator: Roy invents harrowing hunting encounters with wild boars and leaping bucks to comfort his father during an anxious shopping trip for a gold choker.
- Family Life: A mother hands her ex-husband a can opener on the day of their divorce, having watched the helpless student she nicknamed Honey drift into infidelity.
- Coming of Age: Amid the absurdity of his father strapping into an Oshman's display hang glider.
- Also by This Author: Caribou Island, Goat Mountain and Dirt.
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About the author
Published in twenty languages, David Vann's internationally bestselling books have won fifteen prizes, including best foreign novel in France and Spain, and have appeared on seventy-five Best Books of the Year lists in a dozen countries. He's written for the New York Times, Atlantic, Esquire, Outside, Sunset, Men's Journal, McSweeney's, and many other publications, and he has been a Guggenheim, Stegner, and NEA fellow.
