Charles D’Ambrosio is the author of The Dead Fish Museum (2006), The Point (1995), and Loitering (2014), a reprinted and expanded edition of his 2005 essay collection, Orphans. His fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Zoetrope All-Story, and A Public Space.
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The Dead Fish MuseumStoriesFrom"The High Divide"
…one morning at the very end I heard him calling me in the rain. He was on top of our house in boxer shorts, yelling. Our neighbor tried to drive him off the roof by throwing a pot of geraniums at him. My dad started ripping apart the chimney and pitching bricks down on me and everybody else on the front lawn. We had to call the authorities. For a while he thought he was Jesus in a hospital called St. Judas, but it was really St. Jude’s and my dad, of course, wasn’t Jesus.
The Dead Fish Museum:Stories -
The Dead Fish MuseumStoriesFrom"Screenwriter"
The moth flew from my hand, a gust fanned the flames, there was a flash, and the girl ignited, lighting up like a paper lantern. She was cloaked in fire. The heat moved in waves across my face, and I had to squint against the brightness. The ballerina spread her arms and levitated, sur les pointes, leaving the patio as her legs, ass, and back emerged phoenix-like out of the paper chrysalis, rising up until finally the gown sloughed from her shoulders and sailed away, a tattered black ghost ascending in a column of smoke and ash, and she lowered back down, naked and white, standing there, pretty much unfazed, in first position.
The Dead Fish Museum:Stories -
The Dead Fish MuseumStoriesFrom"The Dead Fish Museum"
They walked into the building and rode the freight elevator upstairs. “First thing you do,” Greenfield said, “is board up all the windows. This is a nonunion job.”
“A union for porn?” Ramage said.
“Erotica,” Greenfield corrected him. “There’s a street tax we’re not paying.”
“What’s the plot of this one?” Ramage asked.
Greenfield lowered his glasses and looked at him over the rims as if he were stupid.
“Boy meets girl,” he said.
The Dead Fish Museum:Stories
"[D'Ambrosio's] toolkit, finite and familiar, is the English language, the same one ticker-taping through your conscious mind and mine, but with it he constructs sentences, paragraphs, entire pages of such sustained insight and fluency that you can't help but feel a little fraudulent as a fellow user of the same mother tongue." —The L Magazine [on Loitering]
“These evocative stories are dark and graceful, as deeply nuanced as novels. D’Ambrosio evokes lives of regret and resignation, and there’s never a false note, only the quiet desperation of souls seeking the elusive promise of redemption.” —The Miami Herald [on The Dead Fish Museum]
“Impossible to put down. D’Ambrosio’s prose is fluid, even insinuating. Sentence leads on to sentence with a momentum that mimics the twisted logic of madness, the small steps and sudden turns that lead people from well-lit streets and into dark alleys.” —The Seattle Times [on The Dead Fish Museum]
“Charles D’Ambrosio works a rich, deep, dangerous seam in the brokenhearted rock of American Fiction. His characters live lives that burn as dark and radiant as the prose style that conjures them, like the blackness at the center of the candle’s flame. No one today writes better short stories than these.” —Michael Chabon
Selected Works
