David Vann

"We have a very simple rule. It's a rouble to get in, but two to get out." Thus begins the extraordinary chronicle of Viktor Suvorov's early preferment within the Soviet Army which brought him to Vienna as a spy in military intelligence and ended in his defection to the West. Suvorov's path into espionage was a long one, and not one he chose for himself. Throughout this astonishing record of life on the General Staff of the Soviet Army, to which Suvorov was promoted after ordering his tank company to break out of the tank park by demolishing a wall, and within the elite units of sabotage troops which were his training ground before posting to the undercover residency abroad, it is clear that Suvorov had grave doubts about his entanglement with Soviet military intelligence - the GRU. Here Suvorov reveals for the first time what life was like for those who joined "the Aquarium" - the nickname for GRU headquarters. He talks about the twenty-four hour-a-day training; the arduous fieldwork practice in the back streets of Moscow; the competition between officers abroad to avoid being sent home to disgrace, or even to the crematorium; the daily grind of spying; and the secret operations in the towns and countryside of Europe, many of which were blinds devised only to test his loyalty. The end came when Suvorov knew that he had to inform on the one man in his residency whom he admired. Viktor Suvorov was a spy. He is now a writer. Having established himself as an international expert on the Soviet Army, he has chosen to disclose what must be the most sought-after story of all. Written in his uniquely down-to-earth way, but full of stunning - and ironic - insights, Aquarium is a sensational memoir.

Estas memorias imprevisibles y despiadadas se remontan a 1997, antes de que Vann triunfara con su primera novela Sukkwand Island. Por aquel entonces, David Vann era un profesor de treintaiún años que se ganaba la vida impartiendo clases de escritura creativa en Stanford y organizando chárters náuticos educativos en su propio barco como una apuesta al futuro. En una travesía el barco se estropeó y quedó anclado ante las costas de Puerto Chiapas, también conocido como Puerto Madero, un lugar dejado de la mano de Dios en la costa oeste mexicana con la frontera guatemalteca, centro del narcotráfico y territorio de prostitutas, policías corruptos y niños con amenazantes ametralladoras. This is the tale of the fascinating torment that writer David Vann experienced in a Mexican port with an active drug trade, while trying to revive his broken-down boat. These unpredictable and brutal memories date back to 1997, before Vann released his first novel, Sukkwand Island. Back then, Vann was a 31-year-old professor who made his living teaching creative writing classes at Stanford and organizing educational excursions on his own boat as a future venture. On one voyage, the boat was damaged and wound up anchored near the coast of Puerto Chiapas, also known as Puerto Madero, a godforsaken place off the west coast of Mexico near the Guatemalan border--a hotbed of drug trafficking and territory of prostitutes, corrupt police, and children carrying machine guns.

"Following the success of Aquarium which was a New York Times Editor's Choice and garnered numerous rave reviews, David Vann transports us to 13th century B.C. to give a nuanced and electric portrait of the life of one of ancient mythology's most fascinating and notorious women, Medea. In brilliant poetic prose Bright Air Black brings us aboard the ship Argo for its epic return journey across the Black Sea from Persia's Colchis--where Medea flees her home and father with Jason, the Argonauts, and the Golden Fleece. Vann's reimagining of this ancient tale offers a thrilling, realist alternative to the long held notions of Medea as monster or sorceress. We witness with dramatic urgency Medea's humanity, her Bronze Age roots and position in Greek society, her love affair with Jason, and her tragic demise. Atmospheric and spellbinding, Bright Air Black is an indispensable, fresh and provocative take on one of our earliest texts and the most intimate and corporal version of Medea's story ever told"--

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If you've ever owned a sailboat or had a friend who did, you know how it begins: with a dream. You dream about the ship, and gradually the dream consumes you. Practical considerations lose all meaning ... until, inevitably, the dream morphs into a nightmare. David Vann is familiar with that nightmare. His begins in Turkey: a thirty-year-old tourist, he stumbles across the steel frame of a ninety-foot sailboat that cries out to be built. From friends, family, and credit cards, he borrows the $150,000 to construct the ship. The Turkish builders take shameless advantage of him, eventually charging him over $500,000. On the edge of financial ruin, Vann starts a chartering business. But, when some new part of the ship isn't falling apart, he encounters freak storms. As his debts escalate, Vann begins to wonder if he is merely repeating his father's dreams and failures at sea-which ended with his father's suicide.

On a small island in a glacier-fed lake on Alaska's Kenai Peninsula, a marriage is unravelling. Gary, driven by thirty years of diverted plans, and Irene, haunted by a tragedy in her past, are trying to rebuild their life together. Following the outline of Gary's old dream, they're hauling logs out to Caribou Island in good weather and in terrible storms, in sickness and in health, to patch together the kind of cabin that drew them to Alaska in the first place. Across the water on the mainland, Irene and Gary's grown daughter, Rhoda is starting her own life. She fantasizes about the perfect wedding day, whilst her betrothed, Jim the dentist, wonders about the possibility of an altogether different future. From the author of the massively-acclaimed Legend of a Suicide, comes a devastating novel about a marriage, a couple blighted by past shadows and the weight of expectation, of themselves and of each other. Brilliantly drawn and fiercely honest in its depiction of love and disappointment, David Vann's first novel confirms him as one of America's most dazzling writers of fiction.

In the fall of 1978, on the 640-acre family deer-hunting ranch on Goat Mountain in Northern California, an eleven-year-old boy goes hunting with three men: his father, grandfather, and a friend of his father's. Goat Mountain is a dry place of live oak and buck brush and poison oak with occasional relief from stands of ponderosa pine, white pine, and sugar pine, and even a swampy bear wallow. This is the place where all the family's memories and stories and history are held. When the men arrive at the gate to their land, the father spots a poacher hunting illegally on his property. When he lets his eleven-year-old son take a look through the scope of his rifle, the boy pulls the trigger. The men struggle over what to do with the dead man. Though the struggle begins between the father and grandfather, it ultimately becomes a struggle between the grandfather and the boy. By the end, nothing is as it seems.