Travel in the Mouth of the Wolf (Soft Skull ShortLit)

When a freak accident involving an infallible gambler, a truck full of chickens and a gas pump leaves an easygoing young man named Iple deaf, he decides to travel to Antarctica. Tagging along with a team of contrary, often childish scientists, he is the sole member of the expedition to keep his head as the days stretch and the nights become non-existent. While wandering the tundra Iple finds the frozen body of a runaway scientist whose ghost asks him to detour towards an enormous sheet of translucent ice. Below the sheet, with her four legs in the air, is Isabella, a dinosaur and the last DNA repository of a wealth of human and pre-human knowledge. What follows is a mesmerizing detour into our species’ fear and wonder at the nature of prediction. Paul Fattaruso’s vision is a statisticians wet dream and a mystics worst nightmare…or is it the other way around? Fattaruso, trained as a poet, spins a lyrical and highly visual modern day fable, a creation myth for the generation whose gods look more like dinosaurs than any monster before or since.