Skinny Dipping in the Lake of the Dead: Stories

by Anya Johanna DeNiro

Skinny Dipping in the Lake of the Dead is Minneapolis-based poet and writer A. DeNiro's wide-ranging and assured debut fiction collection.

DeNiro's stories have been published in the most forward-looking magazines including Fence, Crowd, One Story, Strange Horizons, and 3rd Bed.

These stories skitter sideways across literary and genre fiction categories, using the toolbox of genres like science fiction and fantasy to grapple with...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1931520178
• ISBN13: 9781931520171
• Release Date: July 2006
• Publisher: Small Beer Press
• Length: 215 Pages
• Weight: 0.65 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 5.9" x 8.5"

Customer Reviews

Genre crossing short fiction...read for pleasure, read to be astounded, read because the stories are

Alan DeNiro's debut collection of short stories, Skinny Dipping in the Lake of the Dead, is everything that I hoped Jeffrey Ford's stories would be and weren't. The stories vary in length from very short (The Exchanges which is a weird exercising in changing identities ) to a longer story (the title story). What I like best about this collection is how DeNiro takes ordinary every day settings and twists it just enough that an average everyday person is caught up in the middle of something extraordinary. In "Salting the Map" a guy gets a job for a map making company and is asked to salt the maps with fictitious cities and this act of salting is an act of creation. "Our Byzantium" has the Byzantium empire invading modern day America. "Fuming Woman" has a circus performer with real power. "Child Assassin" is set in today's world with a hired assassin who kills people's babies. What if a family of giants move in next door? "The Friendly Giants" addresses this. All of DeNiro's stories have this sense of the quirky and there is far more pleasure in reading something out of the ordinary than there is in the high literary style of Jeffrey Ford (not that Ford does not have merit). Skinny Dipping in the Lake of the Dead was published in 2006 and hopefully DeNiro has a second collection brewing because it will be my most anticipated collection of the year for whichever year it is announced. -Joe Sherry