Pulled from the River

Vividly weaving memory, urban legend, and stark reality, Pulled From the River introduces some of Chopan’s most compelling and complex characters, those boys who inhabit the distinctive world of Rochester, New York. The narrator, arguably Chopan himself, takes us through a series of stories, fragments, obits, and letters all in an attempt to understand himself and his place in the city. Along the way we meet, a young man who takes his own life, a boy whose mother is killed by the city’s famous serial killer, and a man who, one night, dances naked in the middle of the street trying to erase his pain. These interlinked stories are narrated by characters raised on loss, and yet filled with hope and insight, grace and grit. Against a backdrop of alcohol, suicide, camaraderie, and hockey, Chopan explores the distance between the city’s greatness and its failures, between place and identity, between who we are and who we hope to be.