David Vann's dazzling debut Legend of a Suicide was reviewed in over a 150 major global publications, won 11 prizes worldwide, was on 40 “best books of the year" lists, and established its author as a literary master. Since then, Vann has delivered an exceptional body of work, receiving, among others, best foreign novel in France and Spain (France's Prix Medicis Etranger, Spain's Premi Llibreter), a California Book Award, and the mid-career St. Francis...

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...