Travel In The Mouth Of The Wolf

(Paperback)

Publishing Details

Classifications

Physical Properties

Description

This is a mesmerising and tightly wound creation myth playing on the fear and wonder of prediction. When a freak accident involving an infallible gambler, a truck full of chickens and a gas pump leaves an easygoing young man named Iple deaf, he decides to travel to Antarctica. Tagging along with a team of contrary, often childish scientists, he is the sole member of the expedition to keep his head as the days stretch and the nights become non-existent. While wandering the tundra, Iple finds the frozen body of a runaway scientist whose ghost asks him to detour towards an enormous sheet of translucent ice. Below the sheet, with her four legs in the air, is Isabella, a dinosaur and the last DNA repository of a wealth of human and pre-human knowledge. What follows is a mesmerizing detour into our species' fear and wonder at the nature of prediction. Paul Fattaruso's vision is a statistician's wet dream and a mystic's worst nightmare...or is it the other way around Fattaruso, trained as a poet, spins a lyrical and highly visual modern day fable, a creation myth for the generation whose gods look more like dinosaurs than any monster before or since.

Reviews

"Bewitching...Fattaruso has devised a delicate fable, an exercise in fictional minimalism painted with wide poetic strokes expressed in a slight 114 pages, encapsulated by 58 chapters, all brief bursts of literary wonder, hitting each note with a memorable verbal grace." - PopMatters "Not since reading Antoine de Sain Exupery's The Little Prince has this reader been so enchanted by a book. Fattaruso's even-keeled lilt of poetic momentum gently carries suspense and unforgettable imagery from page to page, imparting the wonderful strangeness of what it means to be and feel human. Fattaruso's ability to communicate genuine sweetness, vulnerability and poignancy is as strong as Seuss's talent for creating the pure delight of characters such as Cat in the Hat." - Rapid River Magazine "Thought-provoking philosophical tidbits...lucid and beautiful sentences." - Library Journal "[Paul Fattaruso] is a consummate stylist, and his lyrical, surprising prose carries the weight of many adventures, including adventures of the mind." - Review of Contemporary Fiction"

Author Bio

Paul Fattaruso received his MFA in poetry from the University of Massachusetts in 2003. He lives with his wife Kristin in Vermillion, South Dakota, where he is pursuing a PhD.