Full Description
"Powerful ...full of dark nostalgia."--Nathan Englander The Lifeboat All night in his lifeboat my father sang to keep the voices of the other men who cried in the wreckage from reaching him, he sang what he knew of the requiem, of the hit parade and the bits of hymns, he sang until he would never sing again, scalding his raw throat with sea-water until his ribs heaved, until the salt wept from his eyes on dry land, flecked at his lips in his squalling rages, streaked the sheets in his night sweats as night after night the reassembled ship scattered its parts on the shore of his bed, and the lifeboat eased him out again to drown each night among singing men. Inspired by a shipwreck endured by her father during the Second World War, and by his struggle with post-traumatic stress disorder and eventual suicide, Inheritance is a powerful poetic debut by the winner of the 2013 Boston Review Fiction Contest and The Malahat Review Far Horizons Award.
Contents
Inheritance
Seals
Silver Devils
Fallowfield Station
Whiskey Mantra
Lifeboat
Ghost Lake
Muskrat
The Encounter
At Piraeus
Song for a Sleeping Father
Rain Dance
Negative Theology
Saint Sebastian Ooh-La-La
Big Spender
Respite
The Rich
To My Creditors
Family Jewel
Curse of the Magdalene
Rubric
Skinnydipping
The Girls Who Work at the Makeup Counter
Appearances
Jig
The Well
Mirror Lake
Two Views of a Stag
Perdita
Tantum Ergo
Get with Child a Mandrake Root
Bernadette
The Emporer
Fandango
Song for a Smoke-Filled Room
Malefic
Inhuman
The Other Grandmother
Russian Brides
Hensol
The Wreckage
Florilegia
