Call Me Ahab

Imagine a Hollywood encounter between Helen Keller and Frida Kahlo, 'two female icons of disability'. Or the story of 'Moby Dick, or, The Leg', told from Ahab's perspective. What if Vincent Van Gogh resided in a twentieth-century New York hotel, surviving on food stamps and direct communications with God? Or if the dwarf pictured in a seventeenth-century painting by Velazquez should tell her story? And, finally, imagine the encounter between David and Goliath from the Philistine's point of view. These are the characters who people history and myths as counterpoints to the 'normal'. And they are also the characters who populate Anne Finger's remarkable short stories. Affecting but never sentimental, ironic but never cynical, these wonderfully rich and comic tales re-imagine life beyond the margins of 'normality'.

ISBN 0803225334   Pages 206 ISBN13 9780803225336 (What's this?)   Volumes 1 Publisher University of Nebraska Press   Weight (grammes) 249 Imprint Bison Books   Published in Nebraska Format Paperback   Series title Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Fiction Publication date 10 Dec 2009   Height (mm) 213 Library of Congress 2009004673   Width (mm) 142 DEWEY 813.54   Spine width (mm) 11 DEWEY edition DC22   Academic level General

		Helen and Frieda		1
		Vincent		15
		The Artist and the Dwarf		39
		Comrade Luxemburg and Comrade Gramsci Pass Each Other at a Congress of the Second International in Switzerland on the 10th of March, 1912		61
		Gloucester		73
		Goliath		95
		The Blind Marksman		117
		Our Ned		135
		Moby Dick, or, The Leg		163

"An Anne Finger story is unlike any other. In the stories of Call Me Ahab she magically combines fact and fiction, imaginatively re-creating the context of how we understand and look at our bodies, as well as how we look at literature, the stories we tell. This book is entertaining, illuminating, and necessary." Kenny Fries, author of Body, Remember: Memoir and The History of My Shoes and The Evolution of Darwin's Theory "Call Me Ahab intricately embroiders vivid new lives for a range of characters from art and literature whose stories we think we already know. Captain Ahab, Goliath, Vincent Van Gogh, Helen Keller, Frida Kahlo, the dwarf from a Velazquez painting, and Shakespeare's Gloucester all magically shift shapes, eras, and places in Anne Finger's astonishing and stirring prose. These elegant stories rewrite the lives of the unusually embodied, imbuing them with magic and depth to show us how we collectively misrecognize what it means to inhabit a body that looks and works apart from the ordinary." Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, author of Extraordinary Bodies

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