See photos of David's
boat sinking.
National Tour: 80 events, 40 radio interviews.
“Damn exciting.”--Stewart O’Nan,
author of Snow Angels, Faithful, Songs for the
Missing

“At once memoir, confession, travel book and
thriller, David Vann's A Mile Down is so vivid and
intense you will dread to see it end…. The book is
a testimony of passion and courage in deadly
storms and scarier calms, of a man wrestling with
his ghosts and gifts in the very shadow of
paradise."--
Robert Morgan, author of Gap
Creek and Brave Enemies
David Vann’s work has
appeared in
The Atlantic
Monthly, Esquire, Men's
Journal, Outside, Outside's
GO, National Geographic
Adventure, Writer's Digest,

and other magazines and
won various prizes and
awards.  Currently a
National Endowment for the
Arts Fellow, he's also been
a Wallace Stegner Fellow,
taught at Stanford, Cornell,
SF State, and FSU, and is a
professor at the University
of San Francisco. He was
born on Adak Island, Alaska
and lives in the SF Bay
Area with his wife Nancy.  
He recently found out he's
part Cherokee, related to
the Cherokee Chief David
Vann.
.
Author David Vann
Email David
Buy from Amazon.com
Acknowledgments Page
© Copyright 2005-9 David Vann
Buy from your Local
Independent Bookseller
Reviews
Now a National Bestseller!
#4 Washington Post, #7 L.A. Times
Recent feature articles in Esquire (Aug 08), Outside (Oct 08), Outside's GO (Fall 08),and National Geographic Adventure (Jan 09)
"This is one of the most striking fictional debuts in recent memory, and
David Vann is an important new voice in American literature."--
Robert
Olen Butler
, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of A Good Scent from a
Strange Mountain
"In his portrayal of a young son's love for his lost father David Vann has
created a stunning work of fiction: surprising, beautiful and intensely
moving"--
Nadeem Aslam, author of Maps for Lost Lovers and The
Wasted Vigil
"As the title suggests, the stories in Legend of a Suicide approach a
private mythos, revisiting, reinvestigating and reinventing one family's
broken past.  They also transport us to wild, uncharted places on the
Alaskan coast and in the American soul.  Throughout, David Vann is a
generous, surehanded guide in some very dangerous territory."--
Stewart
O'Nan
New York Times Notable Book & Editor's Choice
Winner of the Grace Paley Prize
Buy from Amazon.com
National Endowment for the Arts fellowship 2008 for Crocodile: Murder In a Mexican
Drug-Running Port
, a new, unpublished memoir which tells the story of the initial disasters in Mexico leading up to A Mile
Down
.   Read an excerpt of Crocodile at www.arts.gov.  Four years of feature film options sold.
CNN and Recent NPR Interviews: thestory.org re pirates, Chicago Public Radio re NIU shooter, MPR re Legend of a Suicide
Reading Tour
New York Times Review
Kansas City Star Top 10 Story Collections
Reprinted in the International
Herald Tribune, the global
edition of the New York Times
Read the first chapter, in the
New York Times online
UK, Australia, New Zealand
from Viking UK October 2009
San Francisco Chronicle Top 50
SF Chronicle Review
Paperback from HarperCollins
January 2010
Story Prize Notable Book
All Reviews
Winner of a California Book Award
French edition from
Editions Gallmeister
Italian edition from Bompiani
Last Day On Earth wins 2009 AWP Nonfiction Prize, judged by Lee Gutkind
(book on NIU shooter, to be published 2010 or 2011)