Legend of a Suicide (Harper Perennial) David Vann, whose short story collection Legend of a Suicide earned rave reviews in hardcover, will be here to read and sign the new paperback edition. "The reportorial relentlessness of Vann’s imagination often makes his fiction seem less written than chiseled. A small, lovely book has been written out of his large and evident pain. 'A father, after all,' Vann writes, 'is a lot for a thing to be.' A son is also a lot for a thing to be; so is an artist. With Legend of a Suicide, David Vann proves himself a fine example of both.” —Tom Bissell, New York Times Book Review "Brilliant . . . . Vann's prose follows the sinews of Cormac McCarthy and Hemingway, yet has its own nimble flex." —The Times (London) David Vann is a professor at the University of San Francisco. A contributor to Esquire, The Atlantic Monthly, Men’s Journal, Outside, and National Geographic Adventure, he is author of a best-selling memoir, A Mile Down: The True story of a Disastrous Career at Sea, and the forthcoming Last Day On Earth: A Portrait of the NIU Shooter, Steve Kazmierczak, winner of the 2009 AWP Nonfiction Prize.  He has also been a National Endowment for the Arts Fellow and a Wallace Stegner Fellow.