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Title details for Wilderness Tales by Diana Fuss - Available

Wilderness Tales

Forty Stories of the North American Wild

by Diana Fuss
ebook
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A dazzling collection of short stories about North American outdoor life—both classic and contemporary—from James Fenimore Cooper and Jack London to Margaret Atwood and Anthony Doerr and many more.
The North American landscape, in its rich and rugged variety, has inspired an equally wide and deep range of fiction over the past centuries. Diana Fuss has gathered a rich collection of timeless classics and contemporary discoveries summoning up our close and imagined encounters with all things wild.
From the nineteenth century’s Washington Irving (“Rip Van Winkle”) to the twenty-first century’s Ted Chiang (“The Great Silence”)—a panoramic view of wilderness fiction, from Gothic tales of mystery and suspense (“The Heroic Slave” by Frederick Douglass), to tales of danger and survival (“Walking Out” by David Quammen); from modern tales of retreat and solitude (“Happiness” by Ron Carlson), to never-before-told tales of our new reality—of environment and extinction (“the river” by adrienne maree brown): these are stories that reveal the many ways in which the American literary landscape has shaped—and is shaped by—our conceptions of the wild. 
Diana Fuss nimbly shows, in her introductory text and commentary throughout, the development of the wilderness story, from its emergence in the work of Nathaniel Hawthorne (“Young Goodman Brown”) and James Fenimore Cooper (“A Panther Tale”), to the height of its popularity in the stories of Jack London (“To Build a Fire”), to the environmentally conscious writing of T. C. Boyle (“After the Plague”) and Karen Russell (“St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves”).
Among those whose work appears in the collection: Wallace Stegner, Annie Proulx, Ambrose Bierce, Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, L. Frank Baum, Margaret Atwood, Tommy Orange, Walter Van Tilburg Clark, and Ray Bradbury.

  • Creators

  • Publisher

  • Release date

    February 28, 2023

  • Formats

    • Kindle Book

    • OverDrive Read

      • ISBN: 9780593318980

    • EPUB ebook

      • ISBN: 9780593318980
      • File size: 12611 KB

  • Languages

    • English

  • Reviews

    • Publisher's Weekly

      December 19, 2022
      Literature scholar Fuss (Dying Modern) wrangles 40 stories into this excellent anthology focused on the American wild. Introductory bios provide evocative details and critical insights about the authors, such as Ambrose Bierce, who was born on the Ohio frontier and whose work has inspired contemporary writers of weird fiction. Bierce’s “The Eyes of the Panther,” about a woman’s nocturnal encounter with a wildcat, boasts the strangely precise details he’s known for (a character bears “the expression of a poet and complexion of a pirate”). Lore of another panther features in Lauren Groff’s “The Midnight Zone,” in which a mother and her two boys try to rough it on their own at a deserted Florida camp where a panther was rumored to lurk. In “Pond Time” by Gretel Ehrlich, a woman travels to Alaska in search of her deceased husband’s daughter, whom he fathered with another woman decades earlier. Ehrlich beautifully conveys the impact of the intense landscape on the narrator’s psyche (“the footings of reality were loose”). In Annie Proulx’s tense and layered “Testimony of the Donkey,” hikers Marc and Caitlin become lovers in Idaho, bonded by their devotion to nature and driven apart on the trail by an argument. Short fiction fans will find much to chew on.

Formats

  • Kindle Book
  • OverDrive Read
  • EPUB ebook

subjects

Languages

  • English

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