Wow! eBook
Bear Down, Bear North: Alaska Stories
Author(s): Melinda Moustakis (Author)
- Publisher: University of Georgia Press
- Publication Date: 15 Sept. 2011
- Language: English
- Print length: 144 pages
- ISBN-10: 0820338931
- ISBN-13: 9780820338934
Book Description
In her debut collection, Melinda Moustakis brings to life a rough-and-tumble family of Alaskan homesteaders through a series of linked stories. Born in Alaska herself to a family with a homesteading legacy, Moustakis examines the near-mythological accounts of the Alaskan wilderness that are her inheritance and probes the question of what it means to live up to larger-than-life expectations for toughness and survival.
The characters in Bear Down, Bear North are salt-tongued fishermen, fisherwomen, and hunters, scrappy storytellers who put themselves in the path of destruction—sometimes a harsh snowstorm, sometimes each other—and live to tell the tale. While backtrolling for kings on the Kenai River or filleting the catch of the Halibut Hellion with marvelous speed, these characters recount the gamble they took that didn’t pay off, or they expound on how not only does Uncle Too-Soon need a girlfriend, the whole state of Alaska needs a girlfriend. A story like “The Mannequin at Soldotna” takes snapshots: a doctor tends to an injured fisherman, a man covets another man’s green fishing lure, a girl is found in the river with a bullet in her head. Another story offers an easy moment with a difficult mother, when she reaches out to touch a breaching whale.
This is a book about taking a fishhook in the eye, about drinking cranberry lick and Jippers and smoking Big-Z cigars. This is a book about the one good joke, or the one night lit up with stars, that might get you through the winter.
Editorial Reviews
Review
“Here is a writer who truly has everything–clean and radiant prose; unforgettable characters; formal designs for story after story that are innovative yet utterly readable. All of this happens, moreover, in a thrilling setting, on Alaskan homesteads and waterways where beauty and danger color even the most ordinary day. Moustakis’ women are brave and tough, but full of heart in every sense of the term. Her men can do everything the wilderness asks of them, except love themselves enough to stop drinking. Bear Down, Bear North will be an indispensable collection, not only to read but to teach.” –Jaimy Gordon, author of Lord of Misrule and winner of the National Book Award
“Melinda Moustakis has oceans of talent. This portrait of the creatures, human and otherwise, that inhabit the rough edges of Alaska is unrelenting and sometimes even merciless, but never at the expense of the real emotion contained therein. Her prose is full of the same deep beauty, the same ancient rhythms and cadences of the big spaces she is describing: mountain, glacier, river and sky.” –Pam Houston, author of Cowboys Are My Weakness
“Every so often–make that, all too rarely–a work of fiction that is rooted in place appears in which the very language–natural and elemental–seems as much a feature of the terroir as the weather, soil, trees, rivers. Writers of the American South–Twain, Faulkner, O’Connor, Welty–come immediately to mind. Bear Down, Bear North is set a long way from the American South. But Melinda Moustakis has, in her debut collection of linked stories, written such a book.”
–Stuart Dybek, author of The Coast of Chicago
