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Shopping for Porcupine

A Life in Arctic Alaska

by Seth Kantner

 

Beginning with his parents’ migration to the wilderness of Arctic Alaska and extending to contemporary struggles between subsistence living and sport hunting, Shopping for Porcupine provides an illuminating, unforgettable account of life in the far north. Memories of an imaginary source of childhood surfeit; a grown man’s appreciation for his young daughter’s unfettered understanding of language; enlightened meditations on the permanence, severity, and grandeur of nature; and finally, elegiac warnings and stirring calls to action—taken together, these essays provide a revealing portrait of the author of the bestselling novel Ordinary Wolves, and of the land he so deeply loves.
    Through it all we hear the voice of a true artist. The prose slows and rifles, then leapfrogs and pauses the passage of time, in a landscape unlike any other. Moving, alarming, and utterly beautiful, this collection will further establish Seth Kantner as one of the most original writers in America today.

 Download an excerpt from Shopping for Porcupine




Seth Kantner

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 BA in journalism. He has worked as a trapper, fisherman, gardener, mechanic, igloo builder, and adjunct professor. His writing and photographs have appeared in Outside, Orion, The New York Times, Prairie Schooner, Alaska, Switch!, Reader’s Digest, and other anthologies and publications. He is a Milkweed National Fiction Prize winner, a Whiting Award recipient. His novel Ordinary Wolves won the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Award for Nonfiction. He lives with his wife and daughter in Kotzebue, Alaska.

Quotes:

Praise for the 2004 bestseller, Ordinary Wolves

“A magnificently realized story.” New York Times Book Review

“The first contemporary Alaska novel that seems true. . . . the first one that matters.” Alaska Magazine

“A rare thing of beauty, a novel alive with detail about a life most of us would never experience.” Los Angeles Times Book Review

“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.” Barbara Kingsolver

“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
 


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Shopping for Porcupine
Price: $ 28.00
Binding: Hardcover


Availability
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Publisher: Milkweed Editions
Published: 2008
Size: 6.5 x 8.5
Pages: 256 pp
ISBN: 9781571313011