David Vann Livres

Une île sauvage du Sud de l’Alaska, accessible uniquement par bateau ou par hydravion, tout en forêts humides et montagnes escarpées. C’est dans ce décor que Jim décide d’emmener son fils de treize ans pour y vivre dans une cabane isolée, une année durant. Après une succession d’échecs personnels, il voit là l’occasion de prendre un nouveau départ et de renouer avec ce garçon qu’il connaît si mal. La rigueur de cette vie et les défaillances du père ne tardent pas à transformer ce séjour en cauchemar, et la situation devient vite incontrôlable. Jusqu’au drame violent et imprévisible qui scellera leur destin. Sukkwan Island est une histoire au suspense insoutenable. Avec ce roman qui nous entraîne au cœur des ténèbres de l’âme humaine, David Vann s’installe d’emblée parmi les jeunes auteurs américains de tout premier plan.

Une île sauvage du sud de l'Alaska, accessible uniquement par bateau ou par hydravion, tout en forêts humides et montagnes escarpées.C'est dans ce décor que Jim décide d'emmener son fils de treize ans pour y vivre dans une cabane isolée, une année durant. Après une succession d'échecs personnels, il voit là l'occasion de prendre un nouveau départ et de renouer avec ce garçon qu'il connaît si mal. Mais la rigueur de cette vie et les défaillances du père ne tardent pas à transformer ce séjour en cauchemar, et la situation devient vite incontrôlable.Jusqu'au drame violent et imprévisible qui scellera leur destin. Couronné par le prix Médicis étranger en 2010, Sukkwan Island est un livre inoubliable qui nous entraîne au coeur des ténèbres de l'âme humaine.

In this inspirational memoir, internationally bestselling author David Vann tells the true story of building his own sailing ship and of the disastrous voyage that ensues. As a thirty-year-old tourist in Turkey, David Vann stumbles across the steel frame of a ninety-foot sailboat and decides to fulfill a long-buried dream: he will rebuild the boat. From friends, family, and credit cards, he borrows $150,000 to construct the ship and achieve his ambition. However, when the Turkish builders take shameless advantage of him, eventually charging him over $500,000, Vann finds himself on the edge of financial ruin and decides to start a chartering business. Battling with construction nightmares, spiraling debts and freak storms, Vann begins to wonder if he is merely repeating his fatherâe(tm)s failures at sea, and a career that led to tragedy. At once a page-turning memoir of adventure on the open ocean and a tale of one manâe(tm)s attempt to overcome fate and realise his dream, A Mile Down is an unforgettable story of struggle and redemption by a writer of rare power.

'Startlingly brilliant' Spectator 'A triumph' Daily Mail Aged nine, Caitlin spends almost every afternoon at the local aquarium while her mother works overtime at her construction job. Caitlin's whole world is her school, her mother, occasionally her mother's boyfriends, and the fish at the aquarium. She has no friends at school, apart from Shalini, who is making a paper mache Hindu reindeer with her, and no other family. But Caitlin has made a friend at the aquarium; an old man who seems to know something about Caitlin, something she doesn't even know about herself.

A shocking, suspenseful and daring new novel from one of the greatest American writers at work today, whose previous books include Caribou Island, Dirt and Legend of a Suicide. In David Vann's searing novel Goat Mountain, an eleven-year-old boy is eager to make his first kill at his family's annual deer hunt. But all is not as it should be. His father discovers a poacher on the land, a 640-acre ranch in Northern California, and shows him to the boy through the scope of his rifle. With this simple gesture, tragedy erupts, shattering lives irrevocably. Set over the course of one hot and hellish weekend, Goat Mountain is the story of a family struggling to contend with a terrible crime and its repercussions. David Vann creates a haunting and provocative novel that explores our most primal urges and beliefs, the bonds of blood and religion that define and secure us, and the consequences of our actions - what we owe for what we've done. Dark, disturbing and unbearably tense, this is the startling new novel from David Vann, 'one of the best writers of his generation' (Le Figaro).

This Medea is intelligent and cynical, slighted by a husband and her gender. She is a woman who craves revenge for the fate of being born a woman and thus rendered powerless in a world ruled by men. Vann strips away the softer parts of Medea's character as ruthlessly as Medea slits throats ... The centrepiece of Bright Air Black is the butchering of Pelias, a long and magnificently gruesome scene, described in stomach-churning detail ... Vann leaves us with the troubling paradox that murderous Medea is also a devoted mother ... Vann evokes this visceral, sensual, brutal world of warring city states, capricious gods and fragile human agency in a fractured prose style, reminiscent of ancient Greek drama and poetry. Short poetic phrases pile up, fall away, stop short. Powerful internal rhythms build and subside, like the waves the Argonauts sail over ... The time and the place may be very different from his previous novels, but Bright Air Black shares the same central structure of a searing family drama set against a backdrop of untamed nature ... At the heart of this ambitious, dazzling, disturbing and memorable novel lies the uneasy juxtaposing of the wild and the civilised, and the complex, shifting relationship between the two. Rebecca Abrams Financial Times

Twelve-year-old Caitlin lives alone with her mother-- a docker at the local container port-in subsidized housing next to an airport in Seattle. Each day, while she waits to be picked up after school, Caitlin visits the local aquarium to study the fish. Gazing at the creatures within the watery depths, Caitlin accesses a shimmering universe beyond her own. When she befriends an old man at the tanks one day, who seems as enamored of the fish as she, Caitlin cracks open a dark family secret and propels her once-blissful relationship with her mother toward a precipice of terrifying consequence. In crystalline, chiseled yet graceful prose, Aquarium takes us into the heart of a brave young girl whose longing for love and capacity for forgiveness transforms the damaged people around her.

In his riveting new novel, internationally bestselling New York Times Notable author and Prix Medicis étranger-winner David Vann reimagines his father’s final days. Halibut on the Moon traces the roots of mental illness in one man’s life as he attempts to anchor himself to the places and people that once shaped his sense of identity.Middle-aged and deeply depressed, Jim arrives in California from Alaska and surrenders himself to the care of his brother Gary, who intends to watch over him. Swinging unpredictably from manic highs to extreme lows, Jim wanders ghost-like through the remains of his old life attempting to find meaning in his tattered relationships with family and friends. As sessions with his therapist become increasingly combative and his connections to others seem ever more tenuous, Jim is propelled forward by his thoughts, which have the potential to lead him, despairingly, to his end.Halibut on the Moon is a searing exploration of a man held captive by the dark logic of depression and struggling mightily to wrench himself free. In vivid and haunting prose, Vann offers us an aching portrait of a mind in peril, searching desperately for some hope of redemption.

When the construction of their dream cabin on an isolated Alaskan island is interrupted by an early Arctic winter, Gary and Irene find their marriage unraveling as they become stranded with their daughter, Rhoda, who watches helplessly as her parents drift further apart.

Roy is still young when his father, a failed dentist and hapless fisherman, commits suicide on the deck of his boat. Throughout his life, Roy returns to that moment, gripped by its memory and the shadow it casts over his small-town boyhood. Finally, Roy lays his father's ghost to rest. But not before he exacts a gruelling, exhilarating revenge.