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 ccp 005Orphans (essays) by Charles D'Ambrosio 238 pp. isbn: 0-9723234-5-7 $12.95
These eleven essays span continents, culture, and class. Fiction writer and essayist Charles D'Ambrosio inspects manufactured homes in Washington state; tours the rooms of Hell House, a Pentecostal "haunted house" in Texas; visits the dormitories and hallways of a Russian orphanage in Svirstroy; and explores the textual space of family letters, at once expansive and claustrophobic. In these spaces, or the people who inhabit them, he unearths a kind of optimism, however guarded. He introduces us to a defender of gray whales; the creator of Biosquat, a utopian experiment in Austin, Texas; and a younger version of himself, searching for "culture" in Seattle in 1974. He analyzes the nuances of Mary Kay Letourneau's trial and contemplates the persistence of rain and of memory. "Orphans does for the Northwest what Joan Didion's essays did for California; it gives this place definition and legitimacy. Like Didion's, D'Ambrosio's essays are perspicacious, clean, and wrenching. They have the terrific gravity of great stories." —Christopher Frizzelle, The Stranger "These wayward, deeply human essays offer a perfect antidote to false simplicity." —Joy Press, Village Voice "D'Ambrosio is a major talent. He blends the absurdist sensibility of Donald Barthelme with John Updike's plush prose and Philip Roth's dyspeptic humor to create a voice wholly his own. Whether his muse will some day deliver a great novel is an open question, but for now we have Orphans, and Orphans is plenty." —Michael Hardy, The Rice Thresher
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