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Nancy Lord, one of Alaska’s best-known writers, has been writing fiction and nonfiction in Alaska for more than fifty years. Let Them Tell You gathers selected stories from her three previous short fiction books, each first published in a different decade, alongside newer work, some published in journals and some unpublished until now.

Lord first wrote as a way to think about her life in Alaska when she was a young woman, and her curiosity took her farther afield with each book. Some stories draw on personal experience; others from newspaper headlines, historical events, and myths. Some respond to earlier writers and their literary works. Some are serious about social concerns and matters of justice; some are seriously funny. Animals and children, seekers and dreamers—in one case an entire community—all take turns as central characters. This collection traces Lord’s writerly influences and her concerns for both humankind and the natural world and suggests the ways writers and readers alike travel through time and imagined lives, learning as they go about cruelties, compassion, and the human heart. An introduction by the author and an afterword by scholar Eric Heyne supplement the stories with context about the writer’s journey and the evolution of Alaska literature.

Lord’s close observation of the natural world is a hallmark of her work, as is her attention to environmental themes and social issues. Let Them Tell You demonstrates the range of her talent for presenting not only variations on life in Alaska but the human condition on a larger and timeless scale.

This is a comedy about climate change, in which a girl and a donkey become friends, then decide to marry time.

A lyric fable, Life in a Field intersperses Katie Peterson’s slow-moving, cinematic, and sensual writing with three folios of photographs by Young Suh. Introspection, wish, dream, and memory mark this tale, which is set in a location resembling twenty-first-century California—with vistas and orchards threatened by drought and fires. This is also a place of enchantment, a fairy-tale landscape where humans and animals live as equals. As the girl and the donkey grow up, they respond to the difficulties of contemporary civilization, asking a question that meets our existential moment: What do you do with the story you didn’t wish for? A narrator’s voice combines candor with distance, attempting to find a path through our familiar strife, toward a future that feels all but impossible, and into what remains of beauty and pleasure. Life in a Field tries to reverse our accelerating destruction of the natural world, reminding us of “the cold clarity we need to continue on this earth.”