About the book

In Handbook for Drowning, Walter Jaffe grows up in a family obsessed with social justice; Walter fixates on his own mortality. The novel's pointillistic structure reflects the gap between the grief Walter feels for his dying mother and the impersonal rationality he's been taught to practice.

Praise

“Handbook for Drowning painfully, accurately chronicles the endemic disease of our time: the difficulty of feeling.” —Rhoda Koenig, New York Magazine

“David Shields’s tautly constructed, tartly observant stories present Walt as a survivor of family drowning, now free to grow up . . . their cumulative effect is powerful.” —Dan Cryer, New York Newsday