About the Book
In a small fictional town on the Oregon coast there are love affairs and almost-love-affairs, mystery and hilarity, bears and tears, brawls and boats, a garrulous logger and a silent doctor, rain and pain, Irish immigrants and Salish stories, mud and laughter. There's a Department of Public Works that gives haircuts and counts insects, a policeman who is addicted to Puccini, a philosophizing crow, beer, and berries. An expedition is mounted, a crime is committed, and there's an unbelievably huge picnic on the football field. Babies are born. A car is cut in half with a saw. A river confesses what it's thinking ... This is the tale of a town, written in a distinct and lyrical voice, and when the book ends, listeners will be more than a little sad to leave the village of Neawanaka, on the wet coast of Oregon, beneath the hills that used to boast the biggest trees in the history of the world.
About the Author :
Brian Doyle (1956-2017) was the longtime editor of Portland Magazine at the University of Portland, in Oregon. He is the author of six collections of essays, two collections of "proems," two nonfiction books, the short story collection Bin Laden's Bald Spot, the novella Cat's Foot, and the novels Mink River, The Plover, and Martin Marten. Doyle's books have seven times been finalists for the Oregon Book Award, and his essays have appeared in the Atlantic Monthly, Harper's, Orion, the American Scholar, the Sun, the Georgia Review, and in newspapers and magazines around the world, including the New York Times, the Times of London, and the Age (in Australia). His essays have also been reprinted in the annual Best American Essays, Best American Science & Nature Writing, and Best American Spiritual Writing anthologies. Among various honors for his work is a Catholic Book Award, three Pushcart Prizes, the John Burroughs Award for Nature Essays, Foreword Reviewss' Novel of the Year award in 2011, and the Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2008 (previous recipients include Saul Bellow, Kurt Vonnegut, Flannery O'Connor, and Mary Oliver). David Drummond has made his living as an actor for over twenty-five years, appearing on stages large and small throughout the country and in Seattle, Washington, his hometown. He has narrated over seventy audiobooks for Tantor, in genres ranging from current political commentary to historical nonfiction, from fantasy to military, and from thrillers to humor. He has received multiple AudioFile Earphones Awards, including one for his first audiobook, Love 'Em or Lose 'Em: Getting Good People to Stay. When not narrating, David keeps busy writing plays and stories for children.
Review :
"Award-winning essayist Doyle writes with an inventive and seductive style that echoes that of ancient storytellers. This lyrical mix of natural history, poetry, and Salish and Celtic lore offers crime, heartaches, celebrations, healing, and death...Enthusiastically recommended."
-- "Library Journal (starred review)"
"Community is the beating heart of this fresh, memorable debut...[an] original, postmodern, shimmering tapestry of small-town life that profits from the oral traditions of the town's population of Native Americans and Irish immigrants. Those intrigued by the cultural heritage of the Pacific Northwest will treasure every lyrical sentence."
-- "Publishers Weekly"
"Richly imagined, distinctive, beautiful...I was pulled along steadily, my heart raced, I held my breath."
-- "Molly Gloss, author of The Hearts of Horses "
"The prosaic and the spiritual merge in a portrait of life in a small Oregon town...[showing] how the mystical can influence otherwise ordinary lives."
-- "Kirkus Reviews"
"This tale is quintessential North Coast, but in its sensibility and lilt this story is as Irish as tin whistles--and the pairing is an unprecedented delight."
-- "David James Duncan, author of The Brothers K and The River Why"
