“People break my heart. Every single one of them does.” In settings that range from rural fishing communities to the urban capital, the stories of Cabin, Clearing, Forest are a lyrical road map to the human landscape of contemporary Alaska. In “Blue Ticket,” a stranger finds solace in a Juneau homeless encampment. Old friends argue over the pleasures and perils of small-town life in “A Beginner’s Guide to Leaving Your Hometown,” and in “Every Island Longs for the Continent,” a young family falls apart after moving to Kodiak. In these thirteen stories, Zach Falcon explores the burdens of familiarity and the pains of estrangement through characters struggling with their place in the world.

In his final, major publication Ernest S. “Tiger” Burch Jr. reconstructs the distribution of caribou herds in northwest Alaska using data and information from research conducted over the past several decades as well as sources that predate western science by more than one hundred years. Additionally, he explores human and natural factors that contributed to the demise and recovery of caribou and reindeer populations during this time. Burch provides an exhaustive list of published and unpublished literature and interviews that will intrigue laymen and experts alike. The unflinching assessment of the roles that humans and wolves played in the dynamics of caribou and reindeer herds will undoubtedly strike a nerve. Supplemental essays before and after the unfinished work add context about the author, the project of the book, and the importance of both.

The final collection of stories by award-winning writer Marjorie Kowalski Cole, The City Beneath the Snow is a portrait of contemporary Alaskans and a look at the moral decisions that lurk in the unexpected corners of daily life.

"Marjorie Kowalski Cole's characters live, work, and struggle in interior Alaska, and she depicts life here with a keen eye and with compassion. We see the daughter of a Fairbanks junkyard owner struggling with her isolation. We meet a bartender at Circle Hot Springs who's also a certified nurse's assistant at Fairbanks Memorial Hospital. . . . These are inner lives, revealed with care and with skill, the true material of good literature."—Peggy Shumaker, Alaska State Writer Laureate

In October of 2010, six men who were serving on the board of the Calista Elders Council (CEC) gathered in Anchorage with CEC staff to spend three days speaking about the subsistence way of life. The men shared stories of their early years growing up on the land and harvesting through the seasons, and the dangers they encountered there. The gathering was striking for its regional breadth, as elders came from the Bering Sea coast as well as the Yukon and Kuskokwim rivers. And while their accounts had some commonalities, they also served to demonstrate the wide range of different approaches to subsistence in different regions.
            This book gathers the men’s stories for the current generation and those to come. Taken together, they become more than simply oral histories—rather, they testify to the importance of transmitting memories and culture and of preserving knowledge of vanishing ways of life.
 

With precise and evocative prose, Cold Spell tells the story of a mother who risks everything to start over and a daughter whose longings threaten to undo them both.
From the moment Ruth Sanders rips a glossy photo of a glacier from a magazine, she believes her fate is intertwined with the ice. Her unsettling fascination bewilders her daughter, sixteen-year-old Sylvie, still shaken by her father’s leaving. When Ruth uproots Sylvie and her sister from their small Midwestern town to follow her growing obsession—and a man—to Alaska, they soon find themselves entangled with an unfamiliar wilderness, a divided community, and one another. As passions cross and braid, the bond between mother and daughter threatens to erode from the pressures of icy compulsion and exposed secrets.
Inspired by her own experience arriving by bush plane to live on the Alaska tundra, Deb Vanasse vividly captures the reality of life in Alaska and the emotional impact of loving a remote and unforgiving land.

With a fleet of telescopes in space and giant observatories on the ground, professional astronomers produce hundreds of spectacular images of space every year. These colorful pictures have become infused into popular culture and can found everywhere, from advertising to television shows to memes. But they also invite questions: Is this what outer space really looks like? Are the colors real? And how do these images get from the stars to our screens?

Coloring the Universe uses accessible language to describe how these giant telescopes work, what scientists learn with them, and how they are used to make color images. It talks about how otherwise un-seeable rays, such as radio waves, infrared light, X-rays, and gamma rays, are turned into recognizable colors. And it is filled with fantastic images taken in far-away pockets of the universe. Informative and beautiful, Coloring the Universe will give space fans of all levels an insider’s look at how scientists bring deep space into brilliant focus.

“The earth near our place/ was cradle, / it rocked us— / became our skin. / House doors opened, / spilled us out, / we disappeared into trees— / they clothed us in delirious green. /. . . We knew the song / of this place, made it up, / sang it—”
 
Homestead life is often romanticized as a valiant, resilient family persisting in the clean isolation of pristine wilderness, living off the land and depending only on each other. But there can be a darker side to this existence.

Linda Schandelmeier was raised on a family homestead six miles south of the fledgling town of Anchorage, Alaska in the 1950s and ’60s. But hers is not a typical homestead story. In this book, part poetic memoir and part historical document, a young girl comes of age in a family fractured by divorce and abuse. Schandelmeier does not shy away from these details of her family history, but she also recognizes her childhood as one that was unique and nurturing, and many of her poems celebrate homestead life. Her words hint at her way of surviving and even transcending the remoteness by suggesting a deeper level of human experience beyond the daily grind of homestead life; a place in which the trees and mountains are almost members of the family. These are poems grounded in the wilds that shimmer with a mythic quality. Schandelmeier’s vivid descriptions of homesteading will draw in readers from all types of lives.

With Common Interior Alaska Cryptogams, Gary A. Laursen and Rodney Seppelt offer the first field guide to cryptogams of the Denali National Park and Preserve. Useful to both lay and professional investigators, this fully illustrated compendium covers mushroom fungi, lichenized fungi, lichenicolous fungi, slime molds, mosses, and liverworts. This field guide to commonly seen cryptogams will provide a basis for understanding their vast diversity of taxa, speciation, edibility, relative abundance, and utility, as well as the ecological roles played by these organisms.

“Alaska is now open to civilization.” With those six words in 1900, the northernmost territory finally had a connection with the rest of the country. The telegraph system put in place by the US Army Signal Corps heralded  the start of Alaska’s communication network. Yet, as hopeful as that message was, Alaska faced decades of infrastructure challenges as remote locations, extreme weather, and massive distances all contributed to less-than-ideal conditions for establishing reliable telecommunications.

Connecting Alaskans tells the unique history of providing radio, television, phone, and Internet services to more than six hundred thousand square miles. It is a history of a place where military needs often trumped civilian ones, where ham radios offered better connections than telephone lines, and where television shows aired an entire day later than in the rest of the country.

Heather E. Hudson covers more than a century of successes while clearly explaining the connection problems still faced by remote communities today. Her comprehensive history is perfect for anyone interested in telecommunications technology and history, and she provides an important template for policy makers, rural communities, and developing countries struggling to develop their own twenty-first-century infrastructure.

A cold climate is no excuse for a dull, colorless garden. The key is knowing the right plants that will survive and thrive in even the chilliest environments. Who better to guide gardeners than an expert from the far north? Award-winning designer and Alaska gardener Brenda Adams has spent decades searching for exceptional plants that flourish in wintery climates. In Cool Plants for Cold Climates, she presents vivid and detailed portraits of the best and most beautiful of the bunch.

When Adams moved from the warm Southwest to Alaska, she found herself in a different gardening world, with few guides on how to approach this new ecosystem. Now, more than twenty-five years later, she shares the secrets gained from her years of gardening experiments as well as bountiful advice from friends and local nurseries. She explains how to evaluate a plant, balancing its artistic attributes with its more utilitarian ones, as well as how to evaluate your space and soil. Adams then takes you into the nursery, offering guidance on how to pick the best of the best. Finally, she offers a detailed look at a wide variety of wonderful plants, highlighting those that offer overall beauty, are especially easy to care for, and solidly hardy. With more than three hundred vivid pictures of both individual plants and full gardens, Adams proves that there is a bounty of plants, in a rainbow of colors, waiting to brighten up your space.

This collection of poetry is inspired by the author’s lineage as an Iñupiaq Eskimo woman with family from King Island and Mary’s Igloo, Alaska. The poems’ syncopated cadences and evocative images bring to life the exceptional physical and cultural conditions of the Arctic and sub-Arctic that have been home to her ancestors for tens of thousands of years, while the poems’ speakers refer to an indigenous identity that has become increasingly plural.

The author’s perspective as a Native person affords her unique insight into the relationship with place and self, which she applies in her consideration of the arctic landscape and to questions of adaptation and resilience. Kane’s work refers to the Inupiaq oral tradition, and while in some poems she continues to revisit, rewrite, and revise traditional narratives that are suited to the lyric form, she moves beyond narrative retelling, honoring the legacy of imagination that has sustained Inupiaq people for millennia.

Alaska has long been a nurturing home for artists, with its stunning natural beauty, rich cultural life, and unique communities. In recent years, artists in Alaska have had an additional source of support: the awarding of annual grants to craftsmen, musicians, performers, visual artists, and writers by the Rasmuson Foundation.
            Creative Alaska profiles the award winners from 2004 to 2013 in three categories: Distinguished Artists, Fellowships, and Project Awards. Richly illustrated accounts of each of the artists and their work illuminate the challenges and opportunities of the artistic life in Alaska and the powerful impact of the Rasmuson Foundation’s support.
 

A man witnesses a tragic accident that calls his own life into question. A young woman meets her high school sweetheart after many years and seeks to make sense of the separate paths they've taken. A soldier home from Iraq tries to rebuild his life in a remote Alaskan village.

These are fishing stories, told as such stories are meant to be: simple, often coarse, and tinged with the elemental beauty of the sea. They reflect rugged lives lived on the edge of the ocean’s borders, where grief and grace ride the same waves. Rosemary McGuire, a fisherman herself, captures the essential humanity at the heart of each tale. No one comes through unscathed, but all retain a sense of hope and belief in earthly miracles, however humble.

A dazzling debut, The Creatures at the Absolute Bottom of the Sea will leave readers with a sense of the fragility and beauty inherent in eroded lives spent in proximity to danger.

For millennia, “the North” has held a powerful sway in Western culture. Long seen through contradictions—empty of life yet full of promise, populated by indigenous communities yet ripe for conquest, pristine yet marked by a long human history—it has moved to the foreground of contemporary life as the most dramatic stage for the reality of climate change.
 
This book brings together scholars from a range of disciplines to ask key questions about the North and how we’ve conceived it—and how conceiving of it in those terms has caused us to fail the region’s human and nonhuman life. Engaging questions of space, place, indigeneity, identity, nature, the environment, justice, narrative, history, and more, it offers a crucial starting point for an essential rethinking of both the idea and the reality of the North.