The City Beneath the Snow
276 pages, 6 x 9
Paperback
Release Date:15 Mar 2013
ISBN:9781602231559
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
"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
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. A newcomer to Fairbanks fall in love with the aurora. We watch a marriage strained nearly to breaking after a young daughter drowns in the slough. We seen an alcohol abuse counselor and the pilot that flies her around the bush trying to find their way after a brief sexual encounter. These are the inner lives, revealed with care and with skill, the true material of good literature.
These are indeed short stories, but each has its own unquestionable beauty. . . . The characters are real, their situations elicit compassion, and Cole's writing deserves to be savored.
In her posthumous book of short stories, Bellwether Prize-winner Cole (A Spell on the Water) pays homage to the strength and beauty of the people and landscape of her adopted home, Alaska—an entity formidable enough to seem a character in its own right, as it drives, confounds, and inspires its inhabitants.’
Marjorie Kowalski Cole (1953–2009) was a prodigious writer of fiction, essays, and poetry, including the Bellwether Prize-winning book Correcting the Landscape; Inside, Outside, Morningside, and A Spell on the Water.
