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 people history and myth as counterpoints to the “normal.” And they are also the characters who populate Anne Finger’s remarkable short stories. Affecting but never sentimental, ironic but never cynical, these wonderfully rich and comic tales reimagine 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 author of several books, including Bone Truth: A Novel; Basic Skills: A Short Story Collection; and the memoir Elegy for a Disease: A Personal and Cultural History of Polio.

"In this marvelously original collection, Finger explores the nature and function of legendary outcasts, from Goliath, initially ridiculed for his giantism before he became a savior of the Philistines, to Vincent Van Gogh, tortured madman and impoverished artist caught in a bureaucratic vacuum as he waits for his Social Security benefits. . . . Brisk, inventive and intelligent, these stories do their own thing, and do it well."—Publishers Weekly

"Anne Finger’s award-winning Call Me Ahab showcases a plethora of historical and literary characters—each of whom is in some way disabled—and imagines new scenarios for their lives. . . . It is a cheering section for the forgotten and under-appreciated and a testament to creativity, whimsy, and intellect."—Eleanor J. Bader, Feminist Review

"Finger's unabashedly bold tales creatively reimagine outcasts real and invented."—Leah Strauss, Booklist

"Finger is a talented storyteller, delivering voices and situations with smooth conviction. The scenes she creates jump time and place without jarring the reader. . . . Finger has strength in her storytelling, and hopefully that strength will reach a wide audience."—Amy Halloran, themillions.com

“An Anne Finger story is unlike any other. In the stories of Call Me Ahab she magically combines fact and fiction, imaginatively re-creating the context of how we understand and look at our bodies, as well as how we look at literature, the stories we tell. This book is entertaining, illuminating, and necessary.”—Kenny Fries, author of Body, Remember: Memoir and The History of My Shoes and The Evolution of Darwin's Theory

“Call Me Ahab intricately embroiders vivid new lives for a range of characters from art and literature whose stories we think we already know. Captain Ahab, Goliath, Vincent Van Gogh, Helen Keller, Frida Kahlo, the dwarf from a Velazquez painting, and Shakespeare’s Gloucester all magically shift shapes, eras, and places in Anne Finger’s astonishing and stirring prose. These elegant stories rewrite the lives of the unusually embodied, imbuing them with magic and depth to show us how we collectively misrecognize what it means to inhabit a body that looks and works apart from the ordinary.”—Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, author of Extraordinary Bodies

Winner of the Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Fiction