Second Skin

John Hawkes

Jan 2005 · New Directions Publishing

About this ebook

Skipper, an ex-World War II naval Lieutenant and the narrator of Second Skin, interweaves past and present--what he refers to as his "naked history"--in a series of episodes that tell the story of a volatile life marked by pitiful losses, as well as a more elusive, overwhelming, joy. The past: the suicides of his father, wife and daughter, the murder of his son-in-law, a brutal rape, and subsequent mutiny at sea. The present: caring for his granddaughter on a "northern" island where he works as an artificial inseminator of cows, and attempts to reclaim the innocence with which he faced the tragedies of his earlier life. Combining unflinching descriptions of suffering with his sense of beauty, Hawkes is a master of nimble and sensuous prose who makes the awful and mundane fantastic, and occasionally makes the fantastic surreal.

About the author

Author John Hawkes was born in Stamford, Connecticut on August 17, 1925. During World War II, he joined the American Field Service and was an ambulance driver in Italy and Germany from the summer of 1944 to the summer of 1945. He taught at Brown University for thirty years. He wrote eighteen novels, four plays, and a volume of poetry during his lifetime. His first novel, The Cannibal, was published in 1949. His other works include The Lime Twig, The Beetle Leg, and Virginie: Her Two Lives. His novel Adventures in the Alaskan Skin Trade won France's Prix Medicis Étranger in 1986. He died on May 15, 1998.