Seth Kantner -- trapper, fisherman, photographer, igloo-builder, and acclaimed author of Ordinary Wolves -- was born in a sod igloo on the Alaskan tundra and raised on the land, wearing mukluks before they were fashionable, eating boiled caribou pelvis, and trading and living with the Inupiaq, the people native to the region. Kantner attended the University of Alaska and the University of Montana, where he received a B. A. in journalism. Kantner's writings and photographs have appeared in Outside, Prairie Schooner, Alaska, and Reader's Digest, among other anthologies and publications. His work and writing have earned him the Whiting Writers Award, the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Award, and the Milkweed National Fiction Prize among many others. He lives with his wife and daughter in northwest Alaska.
Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association Award
Booklist Top Ten Debut Novel of 2004
QPB New Voices Award nominee
Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers selection
Book Sense Pick and Booksense Bestseller (#38 on extended
bestseller list, Dec 26, 2004)
"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
"An astonishing book."
—Barbara Kingsolver
"Here is a rare thing of beauty, a novel alive with detail about a
life most of us would never experience."
—Susan Salter Reynolds, Los Angeles Times Book Review
"Discoveries"
"Ordinary Wolves—the first contemporary Alaska novel that seems
true . . . the first one that matters."
—Nick Jans, ALASKA
"A magnificently realized story."
—Mark Kamine, New York Times Book Review
"Kantner takes all the hard lessons he learned growing up deep in
the Alaskan wilderness and bundles them up into a commanding debut.
. . . Kantner writes beautifully, but what’s special about Ordinary
Wolves is the author’s unflinching portrayal of Alaska’s social
dynamic—the racial tensions, the contempt for big-game-hunting
dentists, the use of cleaning solvents as booze. Messy, funny, and
anything but noble, it’s stridently human, and Seth Kantner gets
all the blood, guts, pride, and spite down on the page."
—Outside
"Shockingly beautiful. Seth Kantner's Ordinary Wolves is to the
mind what a chunk of pemmican made from dried caribou, cranberries,
currants and rendered fat is to the body: It's going to stick to
your ribs for a long time."
—Minneapolis Star Tribune
"This riveting first novel sets a new standard, offering a profound
and beautiful account of a boy's attempt to reconcile his Alaskan
wilderness experience with modern society. A tenderly and often
beautifully written first novel. As a revelation of the devastation
modern America brings to a natural lifestyle, it's a tour de force
and may be the best treatment of the Northwest and its people since
Jack London's works."
—Publishers Weekly
"This exciting story of a white boy growing up in a sod igloo in
remote northern Alaska challenges any romantic ideas about life on
the last American frontier. A valuable story about a boy trying to
find his place in the world.
—School Library Journal
 |
Ask a Question About this Product More... |
|
