The Dead Fish Museum

A Los Angeles Times Best Book in 2009.

Set in remote cabins, asylums, Indian reservations and the streets of suburbia, the stories in The Dead Fish Museum conjure a world that is fearfully inhospitable, darkly humorous, and touched by humanity.

Charles D'Ambrosio delivers eight short works of fiction that are full of characters floating through their lives and relationships, adrift and apprehensive, tested by failure and strengthened by adversity, 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. 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.

'D'Ambrosio's powerful, minimalist prose and stories hark back to the work of Raymond Carver and Ernest Hemingway. The stories in The Dead Fish Museum are tight, spare and often haunting.' Sun Herald