Аннотация

CLICK HERE to download a free sample from Swallowed by the Great Land “Seth Kantner illuminates an Alaska most of us will never know.” –Andrea Barrett, author of Ship Fever and The Voyage of the Narwhal • Nonfiction short stories that pull you into the lives of those living in an otherworldly place • Seth Kantner received a Whiting Award naming him one of the nation's top-ten emerging writers • Publisher’s Weekly called the author’s 2004 debut novel, Ordinary Wolves , «a tour de force» When Seth Kantner’s novel, Ordinary Wolves , was published 10 years ago, it was a literary revelation of sorts. In a raw, stylized voice it told the story of a white boy growing up with homesteading parents in Arctic Alaska and trying to reconcile his largely subsistence and Native-style upbringing with the expectations and realities tied to his race. It hit numerous bestseller lists, was critically acclaimed, and won a number of awards. Seth’s nonfiction second book, the memoir Shopping for Porcupine , was even more compelling for many readers—the same raw details of a homesteading upbringing, but intensely personal. Now, in Swallowed by the Great Land , he once again brings us into his lyrical wilderness existence. Swallowed by the Great Land features slice-of-life essays that further reveal the duality in the author’s own life today, and also in the village and community that he inhabits—a mosaic of all life on the tundra. Unique characters, village life, wilderness and the larger landscape, a warming Arctic, and hunting and other aspects of subsistence living are all explored in varied yet intimate stories.

Аннотация

Ordinary Wolves depicts a life different from what any of us has known: Inhuman cold, the taste of rancid salmon shared with shivering sled dogs, hunkering in a sod igloo while blizzards moan overhead. But this is the only world Cutuk Hawcley has ever known. Born and raised in the Arctic, he has learned to provide for himself by hunting, fishing, and trading. And yet, though he idolizes the indigenous hunters who have taught him how to survive, when he travels to the nearby Inupiaq village, he is jeered and pummeled by the native children for being white. When he leaves for the city as a young man, two incompatible realities collide, perfectly capturing «the contrast between the wild world and our ravaging consumer culture.» (Louise Erdrich). In a powerful coming of age story, a young man isolated by his past must choose between two worlds, both seemingly bent on rejecting him.