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Poet, nonfiction writer, and lifelong musician Carolyn Kremers moved to Alaska to teach in the remote Bering Sea coast village of Tununak when she was thirty-four. Her first book, Place of the Pretend People: Gifts from a Yup’ik Eskimo Village (a memoir), probed and celebrated that experience. Upriver continues the chronicle of Kremers’ personal journey deep into Alaska and the human soul. Mixing music, Yup’ik language, the natural world, honesty, and an intimate sense of the spiritual and the unobtainable, Kremers presents a cascade of poems made of beauty and pain. The poems fall into five settings—Tununak, the Interior, Shape-Shifting, Return to the Y-K Delta, and Fairbanks. Like salmon swimming instinctively upriver—toward home—this story confronts what it means and how it feels to love a person or a place, no matter the consequences.
The public image of Alaska for those who live elsewhere tends to be bound up with the outdoors. But while that’s not necessarily false, it’s a far from complete picture. This collection of stories shows us what we’re missing: set in Alaska’s cities and suburbs, homes and back roads, cars and kitchens and bedrooms, it offers not tales of adventures, but quietly powerful psychological dramas, introspective explorations of the private triumphs and failures of personal life played out in an extraordinary place. Jean Anderson delicately balances the lyrical and the experimental to tell the stories of hardworking Alaskans—teachers, laborers, dental hygienists, artists—worrying over fairness and equity and meaning, falling in and out of love, and pondering elusive, long-dreamed-of goals. Powered by a rich empathy, Human Being Songs shows us life in Alaska as it’s actually lived today—its successes, failures, and moments of transcendent beauty.
An account of the emergence of creative nonfiction, written by the “godfather” of the genre In the 1970s, Lee Gutkind, a leather-clad hippie motorcyclist and former public relations writer, fought his way into the academy. Then he took on his colleagues. His goal: to make creative nonfiction an accepted academic discipline, one as vital as poetry, drama, and fiction. In this book Gutkind tells the true story of how creative nonfiction became a leading genre for both readers and writers. Creative nonfiction—true stories enriched by relevant ideas, insights, and intimacies—offered liberation to writers, allowing them to push their work in freewheeling directions. The genre also opened ...
"In this intimate chronicle of making a home the hard way, Johnson describes the competing joys and anxieties of preparing for fatherhood in a setting as challenging as it is promising: a paradise of mythic snowfalls and warming wood stoves and elk tracks at the front door, but also a place where vision, and even struggle and compromise, are not always enough. Hannah and the Mountain tells a story of two people exploring the unmapped territories of loss and grief and finding solace and grace in the mountains."--BOOK JACKET.
In these three deeply observed novellas, award-winning author David Nikki Crouse dramatizes the lives of women living in Interior Alaska. Each novella acts as an extended meditation on grief, loss, and the nature of imagination. Crouse’s usual storytelling gifts are on full display here, but the darkness found in past short story collections is balanced by images of stark beauty. In “Misfortune and Its Double,” a woman remembers—and manufactures—the story of an arduous cross-country drive that might not be entirely true. “A Rough Map of the Interior” follows a woman’s life from suicide attempt to hospitalization to a new kind of self-knowledge, and “Asmodeus Speaks” linge...
As the old adage goes, "if you can't say it in a few pages, you won't in a hundred." The selections in Cold Flashes—very short prose and black-and-white photographs—embody perfectly this transparency, thrift, and restraint. Found here are highly polished micro-narratives, both fiction and nonfiction, and a series of eloquent and artistic halftones that capture their sizeable subjects in a nutshell. By minimizing the exposition, the selections stimulate the imagination to reflect on the rich diversity of people and places that make up Alaska. To be savored piecemeal at coffee shops, on the bus, or while waiting in line, the images and text in Cold Flashes will resonate with both the reader and each other, fusing into something profound yet elusive.
The inspiration for The Last Alaskans—the hit documentary series now on the Discovery+—James Campbell’s inimitable insider account of a family’s nomadic life in the unshaped Arctic wilderness “is an icily gripping, intimate profile that stands up well beside Krakauer’s classic [Into the Wild], and it stands too, as a kind of testament to the rough beauty of improbably wild dreams” (Men’s Journal). Hundreds of hardy people have tried to carve a living in the Alaskan bush, but few have succeeded as consistently as Heimo Korth. Originally from Wisconsin, Heimo traveled to the Arctic wilderness in his twenties. Now, more than three decades later, Heimo lives with his wife and two...
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Heralded by Science Fiction Chronicle as one of the Best Books of 2001. Across the waterworld of Aquasilva, change is being fought and ruthlessly suppressed by the Domain and its ferocious holy warriors, the Sacri. When Cathan, a count's son, inadvertently stumbles across a terrifying Domain plot to wipe out the rising discontent, he is thrust headlong into a fight beyond his control.