Call Me Ahab: A Reading by Anne Finger
Call Me Ahab: A Reading by Anne Finger
Imagine a Hollywood encounter between Helen Keller and Frida Kahlo, “two female icons of disability.” Or the story of “Moby Dick, or, The Leg,” told from Ahab’s perspective. What if Vincent Van Gogh resided in a twentieth-century New York hotel, surviving on food stamps and direct communications with God? Or if the dwarf pictured in a seventeenth-century painting by Velazquez should tell her story? And, finally, imagine the encounter between David and Goliath from the Philistine’s point of view. These are the characters who populate Anne Finger’s remarkable short stories. Affecting but never sentimental, ironic but never cynical, these wonderfully rich and comic tales re-imagine life beyond the margins of “normality.”
Anne Finger has taught creative writing at Wayne State University in Detroit and at the University of Texas at Austin. She is the winner of the Prairie Schooner Prize in Fiction and is the author of several books, including the memoir Elegy for a Disease: A Personal and Cultural History of Polio; Bone Truth: A Novel; and Basic Skills: A Short Story Collection.
Recorded Friday, October 23, 2009 at Access Living.