Ordinary Wolves

Author's Bio:

Seth Kantner was born and raised in the wilderness of northern Alaska. He attended the University of Alaska and the University of Montana, where he received a B.A. in journalism. He has worked as a trapper, fisherman, gardener, mechanic, igloo builder, and adjunct professor. His writing and photographs have appeared in Outside, Prairie Schooner, Alaska, Switch!, Reader’s Digest, and other anthologies and publications. He lives with his wife and daughter in Kotzebue, Alaska.

Quotes:

“I've not read anything that so captures the contrast between the wild world and our ravaging consumer culture. Ordinary Wolves is painful and beautiful.”—Louise Erdrich

“Once in a great while a novel comes along that can shiver right down your bones and show you the world was always larger than you knew. This is just such an astonishing book: exotic as a dream, acrid and beautiful and honest as life, it sweeps back the material curtain of human contrivance to reveal what lies panting behind it. A piece of your heart and some longing, I promise, will stay on in that other place forever.”—Barbara Kingsolver

“Seth Kantner's novel, Ordinary Wolves, is a magnificient and dramatic evocation of what it trruly means to be a human being on North America's last real frontier. Ordinary Wolves is an original and beautifully written novel by a fresh new voice in American fiction.”—Howard Frank Mosher

“Ordinary Wolves—the first contemporary Alaska novel that seems true. . . . The first one that matters. . . . Caught in the sort of detail that comes only from long knowing. . . . It was sad and honest, sharp and funny, haunted by a pack of wolves that loped across the pages, ephemeral as windblown smoke. But though Seth's characters—Native or white, animal or human—traveled a hard, lonely trail, he never slumped into condescension or self-pity. There was a generosity of spirit, an empathy for life, that pervaded the entire book.”—Nick Jans, Alaska

“Seth Kantner's first novel, Ordinary Wolves, is a magnificently realized story about a boy's coming-of-age in a difficult, distant place. . . . Ordinary Wolves has scope and a style to match its subjects, the wide-open spaces of Alaska and youth. . . . His novel comes across as smart and authentic. It's hard to imagine a better start.”—New York Times Sunday Book Review

“Kantner writes beautifully, but what's special about Ordinary Wolves is the authentic, unflinching portrayal of Alaska's social dynamic—the racial tensions, the contempt for big-game hunting dentists, the use of cleaning solvents as booze. Messy, funny, and anything but noble, it's stridently human, and Seth Kantner gets all the blood, guts, pride, and spite down on the page.”—Outside Magazine

“Seth Kantner's Ordinary Wolves is a masterful, universal coming-of-age story. . . . In prose as harsh and vast and breathtaking as the North he chronicles, he has given us a land and its life."—The San Diego Union-Tribune

“Imagine Cormac McCarthy's writing minus the arrogance, and you have Seth Kantner. . . . While we're treated to many precise descriptions of snow and cold, of the Arctic landscape and its animals, the shivering uncertainty in the Caucasian boy in an Eskimo world is as clearly drawn as the most detailed rendition of a gutted caribou or a circling wolf. . . . Kantner's descriptions throughout the book stay close to the bones of outdoor northern Alaska, the language intrinsic to Cutuk's world as opposed to being glued on to it. . . . it's as natural and as satisfying, as one season melting into the next.”—Orion

“It is this border that separates real from unreal, North from Outside, that Seth Kantner crosses in his powerful first novel, Ordinary Wolves. . . .  Ordinary Wolves conveys a disjointed, cabin-fevered consciousness made of buckshot sentences, as though Kantner had written a logical progression of thoughts onto index cards, tossed them in the air, and rewritten them in the random order in which they landed. It gives the novel's primary theme of displacement and outsiderness and effective tone, one far more affecting than any straight-ahead observation. . . . There is no off-the-rack romanticization of the 'frontier' here, and no too-easy blaming of 'white culture' as the cause of the sadness and loss currently suffered by northern native people. The refusal to see the contemporary Arctic according to either judgmental liberalism or lyrical nature-loving makes Ordinary Wolves all the more credible as a political document. But it is in its melancholic depiction of how one of the last 'real' places has been forever tainted by the virtual Outside that is important.”—The Globe and Mail

“Ordinary Wolves is anything but ordinary. This first novel by Kotzebue's Seth Kantner delves deep into Alaskans' conflicted relationships with the land and with each other. . . . The power of Ordinary Wolves comes from its nuanced exploration of the relationship between man and nature in Alaska. . . . With rare insight he captures everything from the cadences of village dialect to the natural history of the tundra's changing seasons. . . . Ordinary Wolves is an extaordinary debut, a potential classic that goes beyond the Alaska mystique to probe the heart of its uniqueness.”—Peninsula Clarion

"In the small but growing genre of ecological fiction, the great challenge is to balance political and environmental agendas with engrossing storytelling. This riveting first novel sets a new standard, offering a profound and beautiful account of a boy's attempt to reconcile his Alaskan wilderness experience with modern society. . . . This is a tenderly and often beautifully written first novel. As a revelation of the devastation modern America brings to a natural lifestyle, it's a tour de force and may be the best treatment of the Northwest and its people since Jack London's works.”—Publisher's Weekly

“In a beautiful prose, Kantner writes of what he knows and of what few will ever know. In Ordinary Wolves the reader is introduced to a way of life that has been replaced by a consumer culture. Kantner knows that the cost for such goods is much higher than the dollars indicated by the price tag.”—Barbara Wiedemann, Salem Press

“If anyone has insight into the complexities of the Alaskan frontier and how it should be portrayed, it is Kantner. The book addresses the darker side of human nature, always represented in stark relief to the nature of the animals in the wilderness where Cutuk makes his home.”—Carolyn T. Hughes, Poets and Writers

“Because of Cutuk's repeated insistence on respect for the wild land, this will be called an 'environmental novel,' but such a label doesn't do it justice. For Kantner's greatest respect is for the strange and beautiful facts of life wherever he finds them.”—Tom Nissley, The Stranger

“Here is a first novel of such pristine talent and originality, it's unlikely you'll find its match anytime soon. Wolves is published thanks to the Milkweed National Fiction Prize for U.S. books that champion humane values and cultural understanding, books that sharpen our vision and remind us of the nobility that is our potential, books like this very one.”—John Burns, Georgia Straight

“Kantner . . . brings the reader face to face with life in the wild. . . . Some of his prose waxes into poetry, especially when he describes the Northern Lights. . . . It's Isaiah's vision of the peaceable kingdom, and it can be found in Kantner's poetic language and photo-like imagery in Ordinary Wolves.”—Mark G. Boyer, Priest

“Ordinary Wolves hit me like a bucket of cold water in the face. It woke me up to a worldview as wide as the Arctic horizon and as narrow as the walls of a sod house. . . . If you're looking for a book to wake you up to some of the wider, harder options life offers, I recommend Ordinary Wolves.”—Anne Haley, Anchorage Daily News