Halibut on the Moon

‘An absolutely riveting read, and I take my hat off to Vann for not just imagining his father’s very troubled mind, but for writing such an arresting and beautifully melancholic testament to him…[T]he best thing that I have read so far this year.’ * Readings Monthly *
‘One of the most darkly talented and unsettling writers working today.’ * Guardian *
‘His prose is as clear, fresh and invigorating as a starry winter night on an Aleutian mountainside.’ * The Times *
‘Vann gives us ample food for thought…his incredibly powerful and deeply affecting novel makes us feel as well as think.’ * Australian *
‘Disturbing and haunting…David Vann excels at writing about the darkest side of the human heart.’ * Denver Post *
‘Vann’s gift – his quest, almost – is a willingness to explore the unimaginable, the unthinkable, on the page. He is the real thing – a mature, risk-taking and fantastically adept fiction writer who dares go to the darkest places, explore their most appalling corners.’ * Observer *
‘What endures the most from this novel is the sense of desperation that emerges from its central character—a feeling that’s at once profoundly alienated from everything and everyone around it and heartbreakingly tactile. A moving portrait of a family dealing with loss before it happens and of the harrowing ways depression can disrupt countless lives.’ * Kirkus *
‘Raw and heartbreaking…[A] poignant, powerful story.’ * San Francisco Examiner *
‘Insightful and fearless, Halibut is a melancholically beautiful and important read.’ * North & South Magazine *
‘Crackles with bleakness and beauty, terror and truth.’ * NZ Listener *

David Vann was born in Alaska and comes from a family of sinkers. His father sank a new cabin cruiser in Alaska, right in the marina, by forgetting to put in the drain plug when he launched. Vann’s grandfather sank an old converted Navy cruiser on a lake in California. His uncle sank the same boat twice in Idaho. Vann himself sank in the Caribbean on his honeymoon, as chronicled in his best-selling memoir, A Mile Down: The True Story of a Disastrous Career at Sea.

Every family has to be good at something, and Vann is hard at work continuing the tradition. Last year, he built a 52-foot aluminum trimaran for a nonstop solo circumnavigation for Esquire magazine and had to turn back because the boat was about to fold in half. He’s also had run-ins with pirates in Mexico, which he wrote about for Outside magazine, and he’s sailed by land from Florida to California for Men’s Journal on a ‘Blokart,’ a tricycle with a sail (made in New Zealand, where Vann has residency). He also loves to sail the Mediterranean, and once lost a rudder off Morocco.

In Legend of a Suicide, though, Vann turns to fiction to write about the defining disaster of his life, the suicide of his father when Vann was 13. The book is the winner of the Grace Paley Prize and was named a Notable Book of 2008 by The New York Times, San Francisco Chronicle, Kansas City Star, and The Story Prize.

Vann has worked on documentaries in 2009 with the BBC, NOVA, and CNN, and he’s been a National Endowment for the Arts Fellow and a Wallace Stegner Fellow, taught at Stanford and Cornell, where he received his degrees, and is currently a professor at the University of San Francisco.

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