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.
David Vann is an internationally bestselling author whose
work has been translated into nineteen languages. He is the winner
of fifteen prizes, including France’s Prix Médicis Étranger,
Spain’s Premi Llibreter, the St. Francis College Literary Prize,
the Grace Paley Prize, a California Book Award, the AWP Non-fiction
Prize, and France’s L’Express Readers’ Prize. His books – Legend of
a Suicide, Caribou Island, Dirt, A Mile Down, and Last Day on Earth
– have appeared on seventy Best Books of the Year lists in a dozen
countries. A former Guggenheim Fellow, Wallace Stegner Fellow, John
L'Heureux Fellow and National Endowment for the Arts fellow, he is
a professor at the University of Warwick and Honorary Professor at
the University of Franche-Comté, France. He has written for
publications such as the Atlantic, Esquire, McSweeney's, Sunday
Times, Observer, Guardian, Sunday Telegraph, Financial Times, Elle
and many others. He has also appeared in documentaries for the BBC,
Nova, National Geographic, and CNN.
www.davidvann.com
Part of the experience of reading Vann (over time across his
oeuvre, and within individual books) is a kind of uneasy curiosity
about just how dark he’s going to get and where he’s going to go to
find that darkness. This new excursion is as harrowing as anything
he has written, as thrillingly desolate, in its way, as the
traumatic hallucinations in Legend of a Suicide…One of the most
intense and detailed examinations of an act of violence I have ever
read in a work of fiction. Its unflinching realism eventually
becomes a kind of nightmare surrealism. It is at once deeply
disturbing and powerfully propulsive, a hallucinatory insight into
what it means, and how it feels, to kill. The book is a vision of
hell focused not on the supernatural, but on nature itself. Vann is
a writer who hunts big game. He tracks the same wild territory as
Joseph Conrad and Cormac McCarthy – the violence and perversity at
the root of what we call human nature, the animal savagery that is
our first inheritance…For all its unyielding darkness, Goat
Mountain is, perhaps perversely, an exhilarating experience. It is,
first of all, cathartic in the way of all good tragedies. But it is
also exhilarating for the least perverse of reasons: the experience
of reading a novelist of David Vann's rare artistry and vision.
*Observer*
The Cain imagery is powerful and the narrator’s psyche
fascinating...Vann’s prose never lags. The novel is not just
gripping: it tightens around its reader like a boa
constrictor...Goat Mountain is a brilliant and wise interrogation
of a world in which “We were always killing something, and it
seemed we were put here to kill”.
*The Times*
Vann is a daring writer, as bold in his plot development as he is
unflinching in his prose...Goat Mountain is a compelling and
morally challenging novel by one of America’s most powerful
writers.
*Times Literary Supplement*
Vann evokes the scrub, ridges and conifers of northern California
with the meticulous eye of a great landscape artist...This story
has genuine potency.
*Sunday Telegraph*
This is Vann’s fourth novel, and in that short time he’s mapped out
a unique fictional territory, a rugged, literary landscape with
debts to Cormac McCarthy and Ernest Hemingway but with an acuteness
of eye that’s all the author’s own...Vann’s description of place
and action is unsurpassed, a wonderful clarity to his prose, and
the voice of his narrator is truly frightening as he tries to come
to terms with what’s happened. The tension builds to an
extraordinary and explosive climax among the heavily forested
mountains, where everything that makes us who we are is called into
question. Powerful and deep stuff.
*Big Issue*
The book has the quality of a ballad or a folk tale…Mr Vann’s work
is death-haunted…[He] is so adept, in Goat Mountain, at conjuring a
world where rationality has no place…This story has the power of a
bullet fired from a gun.
*The Economist*
[A] powerful tale of the complicated fragility of family
ties…Internationally acclaimed and bestselling author David Vann
convincingly conjures up the primeval atmosphere of the wilderness
and the depth of the hunting instinct. The spirit of the Old
Testament is never very far from his prose, and the story of Cain
and Abel hovers over the boy’s sense of right and wrong. Tense and
unsettling stuff, difficult to put down and disturbingly
memorable.
*Daily Mail*
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