THE PERIPATETIC COFFIN AND OTHER STORIES
Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers selection / named one of the “Best Books of Summer” by Publishers Weekly / Finalist for the LA Times Book Prize / honorable mention for the PEN Hemingway Award / Winner of the Minnesota Book Award
Alternately funny, menacing, and deeply empathetic, the eight wildly inventive stories in The Peripatetic Coffin mark the debut of a powerful new voice in contemporary fiction. Worried about waning enrollment, the head counselor of the world’s worst summer camp leads his campers on a series of increasingly dubious escapades in an effort to revive their esprit de corps. A young boy on a sailing vacation with his father comes face to face with a dangerous stranger, and witnesses a wrenching act of violence. Parents estranged from their disturbed son must gird themselves for his visit, even as they cannot face each other. And in the dazzling title story, the beleaguered crew of the first Confederate submarine embarks on their final, doomed mission during the closing days of the Civil War. Whether set aboard a Tsarist-era Russian ship locked in Arctic ice, on a futuristic whaling expedition whose depredations guarantee the environmental catastrophe that is their undoing, or in the suburban basement where two grade-school friends articulate their mutual obsessions, these strange, imaginative, and refreshingly original stories explore the ways in which we experience the world: as it is, as it could be, and the dark contours that lie between.