The Ice at the Bottom of the World: Stories

by Mark Richard

Overview

With a distinctive and original voice, Mark Richard's stories capture characters on the fringe of society, and illuminate the goodness at the heart of their Southern, down-and-out lies. Full of startling images and harrowing epiphanies, The Ice at the Bottom of the World is a collection by a true master of his craft. In these ten stories, Mark Richard, winner of the 1990 PEN/Ernest Hemingway Foundation Award, emerges as the heir apparent to Mark Twain, Flannery O'Connor, and William Faulkner.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780804150545
Publisher:	Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Publication date:	04/24/2013
Sold by:	Random House
Format:	eBook
Pages:	160
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

Mark Richard is the author of two award-winning short story collections, The Ice at the Bottom of the World and Charity, and the novel Fishboy. His short stories and journalism have appeared in the New York Times, The New Yorker, Harper’s, Esquire, Vogue, and GQ. He is the recipient of the PEN/Hemingway Award, a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, and a Whiting Foundation Writer’s Award. He lives in Los Angeles with his wife and their three sons.

Editorial Reviews

An abandoned boy with fish-like features stows away on a trawler manned by a deranged crew of outcasts and oddities. (June)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

In Richard's collection of short stories, we are in familiar but updated Faulkner/Caldwell territory, the gothic American South. Specifically, we are in the country of that endangered species, the redneck. In sharply detailed stories presented without excuse or judgment, and often with a sharp bite of humor, Richard offers creditable characters in the middle of their singular lives. In the complex title story, Powell has come to ask Bill Doodlum for his daughter's hand, ``second-hand as it was, a little legal holdover from the mixed-up-divorce-from-Tommy-John.'' As the two men sit in the garage drinking beer, the reader learns about the Doodlums of Doodlum County and the Carters of Carter County, and also learns why, when Bill's wife shoots him, his death is recorded as a suicide. Though full of peculiarly Southern connections, these stories transcend Southern particularity. They are about universals: love and loss and birth and death. --Marcia Tager, Tenafly, N.J.

Library Journal