About Points of Astonishment: Alpine Stories:

In the new and previously uncollected stories that make up Points of Astonishment, David Stevenson follows through on the promise of his Letters from Chamonix, winner of the Banff Mountain Book Award for Fiction and Poetry. These eight short stories describe the fates of their fictional climbers on stages as intimate as their own living room and as vast and unforgiving as the remote Himalaya. Stevenson stirs up a mix of humanity, language, and mountainous terrain and lays bare the answers to the question every fiction writer asks: what if?  In the words of Katie Ives, long-time editor of Alpinist and author of Imaginary Peaks, “. . . one of the great prose stylists of modern climbing literature.” 

Author bio:

David Stevenson is the author of five books, including a fiction collection, Letters from Chamonix (2014), winner the Banff Mountain Book Award, and most recently Points of Astonishment: Alpine Stories (2022).  His nonfiction has been noted twice in the Best American Essays series. His writing has received many awards including the Boulevard Fiction Award for Emerging Writers, The Montana Prize for Fiction, and the H. Adams Carter Literary Award from the American Alpine Club, among others. Since 1995 he has served as the book reviews editor of The American Alpine Journal. He has taught at many universities, including the University of Alaska Anchorage where he directed the MFA program in creative writing for fourteen years.  He lives with his wife on the central coast of Oregon.