Bear Down, Bear North: Alaska Stories

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Overview

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 ...

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Bear Down, Bear North: Alaska Stories

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More About This Book

Overview

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.

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Editorial Reviews

Publishers Weekly
Starred Review.

In this sharply-crafted debut collection, Moustakis invites readers into a world filled with gruff characters, breathtaking wilderness, and a fierceness of spirit as crisp as the Alaskan winter. Though there's little room for tenderness among the men and women who populate her vignettes, Moustakis has an ear for dialogue and uses the space between the notes to convey complexities. Whether her characters are attempting to rescue a bird from an outhouse, exploring the remnants of a plane crash in the forest, or merely trying to land a salmon, she infuses them with humanity. Her portraits of the men who drink too much and the women who stick with them are more than mere stereotypes; she avoids easy characterizations, giving small gestures greater weight. The gifted Moustakis' attention to detail and blunt, sharp prose will surely resonate with readers and fellow writers alike.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

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Product Details

  • ISBN-13: 9780820344904
  • Publisher: University of Georgia Press
  • Publication date: 10/1/2012
  • Series: Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction Series
  • Edition description: Reprint
  • Pages: 144
  • Sales rank: 432,584
  • Product dimensions: 5.40 (w) x 8.40 (h) x 0.60 (d)

Meet the Author

Melinda Moustakis was born in Fairbanks, Alaska, and raised California. She received her MA from UC Davis and her PhD in English and Creative Writing from Western Michigan University. In addition to winning the Flannery O'Connor Award, her book Bear Down, Bear North: Alaska Stories won the Maurice Prize, was shortlisted for the William Saroyan International Prize for Writing, and was a finalist for the Washington State Book Award. Her stories have appeared in Alaska Quarterly Review, Kenyon Review, New England Review, Conjunctions, Cimarron Review, American Short Fiction, and elsewhere. She was named a 2011 "5 Under 35" writer by the National Book Foundation and is currently a 2012–2013 Hodder Fellow at the Lewis Center for the Arts at Princeton University.

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Table of Contents

Acknowledgments Trigger The Mannequin in Soldotna The Weight of You Us Kids This One Isn't Going to Be Afraid Point MacKenzie Miners and Trappers Bite Some Other Animal Mr. Fur Face Needs a Girlfriend They Find the Drowned What You Can Endure The Last Great Alaskan Lumberjack Show Resources

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