Books in Common NW is criss-crossing the US with Susan Conley and Rick Bass as they share their respective new books Landslide, and Fortunate Son: Selected Essays from the Lone Star State.
Susan Conley's Landslide is an immersive look at one woman's reckoning with the disintegration of her family, her marriage, and her community.
After a fishing accident leaves her husband hospitalized across the border in Canada, Jill is left to look after her teenage boys--the wolves--alone. Nothing comes easy in their remote corner of Maine: money is tight; her son Sam is getting into more trouble by the day; her eldest, Charlie, is preoccupied with a new girlfriend; and Jill begins to suspect her marriage isn't as stable as she once believed. As one disaster gives way to the next, she begins to think that it's not enough to be a caring wife and mother anymore--not enough to show up when needed, to nudge her boys in the right direction, to believe everything will be okay. But how to protect this life she loves, this household, this family?
With remarkable poise and startling beauty, Landslide ushers us into a modern household where, for a family at odds, Instagram posts, sex-positivity talks, and old fishing tales mingle to become a kind of love language. It is a beautiful portrait of a family, as compelling as it is moving, and raises the question of how to remain devoted when the eye of the storm closes in.
Susan Conley grew up in Maine. She is the author of four previous books including Elsey Come Home. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The Paris Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, Harvard Review, New England Review, and Ploughshares. She has received multiple fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, as well as from the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, the Maine Arts Commission, and the Massachusetts Arts Council. She has won the Maine Literary Award and the Maine Award for Publishing Excellence. She is a founder of the Telling Room, a youth creative writing center in Portland, Maine, where she lives and teaches on the faculty of the Stonecoast Writing Program.
This is a great read for fans of Lily King, Christina Baker-Kline, and of course Rick Bass!
Rick Bass's Fortunate Son is a literary tour of the Lone Star State by a native Texan of exceptional talent. The essays encompass a Texas that is both lost and found, past and present. The stories reach from Galveston Bay to the Hill Country outside Austin, and from Houston in the 1960s to today. They are bound together by a deep love and a keen eye for the land and its people and by an appreciation for what is given, a ruefulness for what is lost, and a commitment to save what can be saved.
Rick Bass is a Texas native now living in Montana. Recognized by numerous Pushcart Prizes and the O. Henry Awards as well as the Texas Institute of Letters, Bass continues to publish celebrated fiction and nonfiction about the natural world and humans' place in it. His recent books include For A Little While: New and Selected Stories and The Traveling Feast: On the Road and at the Table with My Heroes.