Those of us not in the direct line of Typhoon Murbek’s remnants are still on tenterhooks watching the weather, checking the Nome webcam, and thinking about folks who are scrambling out of harm’s way in Western Alaska. We’ve also done a few geography lessons for concerned friends Outside who may not have grasped before now the vastness of our state.
The “Thursdays: Our History” program for April will get underway at 7 pm Thursday, April 21 in the community room when historian Lee Poleske and former library & museum director Patty Linville will share the tale of the community library’s history. The event is free and open to the public.
From the prizewinning, debut fiction author: an exhilarating virtuosic story collection about women navigating the wilds of male-dominated Alaskan society.
Set in Newman’s home state of Alaska, Nobody Gets Out Alive is a collection of dazzling, courageous stories about women struggling to survive not just grizzly bears and charging moose but the raw, exhausting legacy of their marriages and families. In “Howl Palace”—winner of The Paris Review’s Terry Southern Prize, a Best American Short Story, and Pushcart Prize selection—an aging widow struggles with a rogue hunting dog and the memories of her five ex-husbands while selling her house after bankruptcy. In the title story, “Nobody Gets Out Alive,” newly married Katrina visits her hometown of Anchorage and blows up her own wedding reception by flirting with the host and running off with an enormous mastodon tusk.
Alongside stories set in today’s Last Frontier—rife with suburban sprawl, global warming, and opioid addiction—Newman delves into remote wilderness of the 1970s and 80s, bringing to life young girls and single moms in search of a wilder, freer, more adventurous America. The final story takes place in a railroad camp in 1915, where an outspoken heiress stages an elaborate theatrical in order to seduce the wife of her husband’s employer, revealing how this masterful storyteller is “not only writing unforgettable, brilliantly complex characters, she’s somehow inventing souls” (Kimberly King Parsons, author of Black Light).
About the Author
Leigh Newman is the author of Still Points North, a memoir about growing up in Alaska which was a finalist for the National Book Critic Circle’s John Leonard Prize. Her stories have appeared in Harper’s, The Paris Review, Tin House, McSweeny’s Quarterly Concern, One Story, and Electric Literature. In 2020, she was awarded The Paris Review’s Terry Southern Prize, a Best American Short Story, a Pushcart Prize, and an American Society of Magazine Editors’ Fiction Prize for her work in The Paris Review.
