The Point

From the winner of the 1993 Aga Khan Prize for Fiction comes a literary debut that marks the arrival of a striking new voice in American fiction. Charles D'Ambrosio's work is full of light and humor even in its darkest visions: these are stories of sorrow and mercy, of people struggling to wrest meaning from the tragedies that hover over their lives. All have reached a point from which there can be no true return, and it is in this moment of destruction and renewal - with the world they've known collapsing eerily behind them - that D'Ambrosio's characters begin their perilous crossing from knowledge into forgiveness. The wise-beyond-his-years narrator of the title story guides a drunk woman home along the beach and confronts the violent legacy of his father's suicide. In "Her Real Name," a young man navigates the tired and forgotten allegory of the American West and manages a moment of ceremonial dignity as he buries a young girl at sea. In "Jacinta," a woman mourns her baby girl, who drowned in a tub of water left behind by evening rain. "American Bullfrog" and "Open House" are unforgettable stories of self-discovery and loss, detailing with simplicity and grace the loneliness of looking for a home in the world, or of pretending that you've found one. D'Ambrosio's fictions are packed with incident and bold in narrative sweep; in richly textured and often magnificent prose, they reveal a landscape of suffering and surprising beauty, of grief and restless hope. With the publication of The Point, Charles D'Ambrosio takes his place among the most interesting and exciting writers at work today.

Beyond its central premise, the book can be read through the connected lenses of Fiction. Those themes offer useful points of attention as the characters, ideas, or world develop, especially where the book complicates the expectations of its primary category.