A piece on Charles D’Ambrosio’s Dead Fish Museum for the Pittsburgh City Paper.
If I were to ask Charles D’Ambrosio, the acclaimed author whose short stories have appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review and other esteemed journals of literary writing, one question, it might be this: Are you OK?
Seriously. You might want to see a doctor. Get a second opinion. Take something for that. I just read his most recent collection, The Dead Fish Museum, and pretty much in every one, swaddled around a still-beating but congestive heart, is a broken soul.
In the title story, the down-and-out Ramage is a carpenter for a low-rent pornographer. He’s spent time convalescing in a hospital for reasons unclear. He carries around a tool sack at the bottom of which is a gun. After the job is done, he plans to finish it. Meanwhile, his boss wants his S&M bondage flick to quote Citizen Kane.
