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The Impenetrable ForestBy Thor HansonSynopsis of The Impenetrable Forest by Thor Hanson: For two years Thor Hanson lived in a remote village on the edge of Bwindi Impenetrable Forest where he worked with the local trackers to save one of the world’s most magnificent endangered species, the mountain gorilla. He survived the local moonshine, baboons stealing his vegetables and army ants attacking in his sleep with grace and good humor. In The Impenetrable Forest Thor offers an unforgettable glimpse into the world of mountain gorillas and the African cultures that surround them. Bwindi Impenetrable Forest is home to nearly half of the world's population of mountain gorillas, one of the most endangered species on earth. Thor Hanson was sent to this remote patch of jungle to habituate the great apes to the presence of humans. In an early test case of modern conservation, Hanson worked to make ecotourism an economic incentive to save the gorillas and their rain forest home. Thor brings us face-to-face with the mountain gorillas of Africa...haughty, belligerent Makale, who frequently charged his observers...the young mother Mamakawere... Ruhondeza, her silverback mate...and a gorilla who would one day earn the name friend. The people of Uganda play a vital role in Thor's story. In spite of a history of hardships, from brutal dictators to AIDS, they warmly welcome this young American into their hearts and show him a way of life so very different from our own. In The Impenetrable Forest, Thor Hanson provides a rich backdrop to our fascination with gorillas, from the customs of local people to the experiences of famed explorer Henry Morton Stanley and groundbreaking scientist Dian Fossey. Today Bwindi Impenetrable Forest is a cornerstone of gorilla conservation. A portion of the proceeds from this book will be donated to support these ongoing efforts. Dr. Thor Hanson is a conservation biologist, author, and award-winning poet. He has traveled the globe studying everything from primates and vultures to the pollination of rainforest trees. Hanson’s writing has appeared in a wide range of newspapers, magazines and scientific journals. He lives on an island in the Pacific Northwest.
Wild LifeBy Molly GlossFrom Publisher's Weekly: "Gloss twines just enough intellectual fiber around the sleek cord of a great adventure story to offer up a truly satisfying read. Presented as the 1905 journal of the fictional dime novelist Charlotte Bridger Drummond, Gloss's third novel (after The Jump-Off Creek and The Dazzle of Day) tells the tale of a self-avowed feminist and Freethinker and her sojourn in the wilderness of Washington's Cascade mountains. Abandoned by her husband, Charlotte supports her five boys and her housekeeper, Melba, by churning out "romantic tales of girl-heroes who are both brave and desirable." When Melba's granddaughter goes missing in the woods, Charlotte sets out, as would her heroines, to join the search party. But after days of searching, Charlotte finds herself lost for weeks managing to survive only by insinuating herself into a family of "apes or erect bears of immense size." Knowingly, Gloss plays with one of our deepest fears — lost in the wilderness, will we be saved? — and the myths that have grown from it. Interleaved between Charlotte's notebook entries are passages she has clipped from journals (e.g., of Samuel Butler, Willa Cather, Oscar Wilde) and excerpts from her published and unpublished fiction. Inserted among these are brief scenes — portraits, really — that could be construed as Charlotte's most serious attempts to write, or as Gloss telling us what Charlotte cannot. While Gloss generates heat and humor from the friction between early 20th-century and early 21st-century attitudes, her prose is most satisfying when she describes Charlotte's housekeeper ironing or Charlotte's patient suitor batting a homemade baseball. Deep into the book, Charlotte describes the "lowbrow scientific romances" she fancies. "[M]y preference is for the writer whose language is gorgeous, whose characters are real as life, and whose stories take my poor little assumptions and give them back to me transformed." Gloss couldn't have written a better description of her own novel: the writing is gorgeous, the characters real and vivid, and the story transforming."
Owl IslandBy Randy Sue CoburnOWL ISLAND tells the story of Phoebe Allen, a woman who has led a quiet, self-sufficient life, raising her daughter and running a small fishing-net business…until her history catches up with her. For years Phoebe has concealed truths from her daughter and may now be forced to divulge them. As the past rushes toward the present like an inevitable tide, Phoebe must also confront the early loss of her mother, whose own mysteries are beginning to surface. Along the way, Phoebe discovers the life-transforming benefits of opening one's heart. With memorable characters as diverse as the novel's settings—from fishing village to Seattle's high-tech world to Hollywood—OWL ISLAND is a story of power, control, and how a mother's secrets serve not to protect her daughter but actually put her at risk. Randy Sue Coburn began her career as a journalist whose essays and articles appeared in numerous national magazines and major newspapers, including Esquire, Smithsonian, Elle, The Washington Post, and The Chicago Tribune. Her screenplays include Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle, the 1994 film about Dorothy Parker that premiered at the Cannes Film Festival and won Jennifer Jason Leigh the National Society of Film Critics Award for best actress. Her film work and teaching at The University of Washington subsidized the writing of Remembering Jody, (1999, Carroll & Graf). Randy Sue's second novel, Owl Island, was published in June, 2006 by Ballantine, a division of Random House. Born in Chicago and raised in South Carolina, she is a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of The University of Georgia. Her husband, Nick Fennel, is a visual artist and they currently live along the waterfront in downtown Seattle with Binx, a floppy-eared terrier known by name to many more vendors in the Pike Place Market than his mistress.
TorchBy Cheryl StrayedTorch is a novel about big things—about love and loss and grief and redemption—but it takes place on the small stage: centering on the lives of one working class family as they struggle with the illness and subsequent death of one of its members—the mother. “It’s the story I had to write. The story of my heart,” says Strayed, who lost her own mother, Bobbi Lambrecht, to cancer at a young age. Though Torch began as an autobiographical novel, it soon became almost entirely fictional as Strayed wrote it. “Not surprisingly, the characters took on lives of their own as I got deeper into the story and I happily gave way to that. I ended up with something bigger, more meaningful, and in many ways more true than had I stuck to autobiography.”
Clay CenterBy Phil CondonClay Center is a love story, a tragedy, and an historical coming-of-age novel. Set from January through December 1969, the novel's protagonist, Miller Silas, and his girlfriend, Maureena Ocear, are both each other's first lover and first true love. They are also bright young idealists who are confused, bewildered, worn down, and worn out by the political and economic forces that control the government and wage the war. During the course of the year, they try to counter the negative and destructive energies around them with the strength of their love for each other and for their closest friends, Durham, Grant, and Carlila. Through Miller's story, the novel seeks to bring a fresh honest perspective to a time of great change, hope, despair and dignity--a time that has been most often maligned and masked with either dismissive or euphemistic stereotypes. Along the wild ride of the story itself, the novel asks readers to examine the causes, uses, consequences, and justifications of state-sanctioned violence and of heartfelt resistance to it. Miller's story also implicitly asks readers to evaluate the extent to which the contradictions in our national life that the turmoils of 1969 so starkly revealed were resolved, and to what extent they remain among and inside us today. Phil Condon is the author of River Street: A Novella and Stories (SMU Press, Dallas, 1994), Clay Center (EWU Press, Spokane, May 2004, and winner of the $7500 Faulkner Novel Award sponsored by the Faulkner Society of New Orleans), and Montana Surround: Land, Water, Nature, and Place (Johnson Books, Boulder, November 2004). Born in Cheyenne and raised in Omaha, Phil Condon has since lived in California, British Columbia, Missouri, and from 1987, in Missoula, Montana. Before returning to college as a 37-year-old sophomore, he held a wide variety of jobs, was a union bricklayer for ten years, and lived without electricity for five years on an acreage on the Niangua River in the Missouri Ozarks. His education includes a BA in Writing, an MFA in Creative Writing/Fiction, and an MS in Environmental Studies/Writing. He currently teaches Environmental Writing and Literature in the Environmental Studies Program at the University of Montana.
"Thanks so very much for tuning in as well as you do to the underlying aspects of this project." Sarah Swenson, Author of “Point of Departure” 
Burning FenceBy Craig LesleyCritically acclaimed author, Craig Lesley, has written perhaps his finest work to date, only this time he has reached into the realm of autobiography and succeeded wonderfully. Burning Fence deftly captures the rural humor, rugged characters, and hardscrabble life of Eastern Oregon with its searing reflection on fatherhood and remarkable insight into the landscape of the Western heart. In Burning Fence, Lesley turns his keen eye toward two difficult fathers, his alcohol-damaged Indian foster child, and the panorama of 20th century Western America. Seldom has literature painted such vivid pictures of rural northwest communities and their people. With place names like Madras, Baker City, Pendleton and Portland, this book stretches from the high desert of Oregon to Washington and Idaho. It is peopled with real-life characters that extend beyond fiction, from Craig's shell-shocked father, who abandoned his family to become a reclusive coyote trapper and poacher, and the stepfather, Vern, a tough, controlling railroader, to Craig's colorful half-brother, a would-be hit man, now "born again." Craig Lesley's work has received the Western Writers of America Golden Spur Award for Best Novel, the Medicine Pipe Bearer's Award for Best First Novel, three Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association Awards, and two Oregon Book Awards. He has been the recipient of several national fellowships and holds a Doctorate of Humane Letters from Whitman College. Currently a professor at Portland State University, Craig lives with his wife and two daughters in Portland, Oregon. In 1996 Craig was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize for his novel The Sky Fisherman.
Rogue River JournalBy John DanielIn November of 2000, after the presidential election but before the final results had been handed down by the Supreme Court, John Daniel climbed into his pickup, drove to a remote location in Oregon's Rogue River Canyon, and quit civilization. The strictures were severe. No two-way human communication, no radio, no music, not even his cat. He would isolate himself in a cabin sure to be snowed in soon after his arrival, intent on hearing no human voice but his own until spring thawed the road. This experiment in solitude was an attempt to clarify his identity while pursuing daily life without the distractions of the world at large and many of the comforts of ordinary domesticity. Thoreau's Walden and Journal with him for inspiration and instruction, Daniel meditated every day and kept a journal, writing about the experience of solitude. He also had other work to do: to come to terms with his dead father, a charismatic union organizer during the heyday of the American labor movement, and to relive the troubled passage of his late teens and early twenties in the 1960s, when he dropped out of college, dithered over the military draft, and lived as a hippie in San Francisco and Portland. These narratives weave together, and the result, Rogue River Journal, is a remarkable memoir of the joys and tribulations of solitude, the mysteries of growing up, and the haunting legacies of a father. John Daniel is the author of eight books of memoir, poetry, and personal essays. His work has won him a Wallace Stegner Fellowship at Stanford University, two Oregon Book Awards for Literary Nonfiction, and a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, among other honors. He lives with his wife, two cats, and usually a packrat in the Coast Range foothills west of Eugene, Oregon.
Lie StillBy David FarrisIn a sleepy, small-town Arizona hospital, a thirteen-year-old boy lies in a coma after inexplicably suffering a cardiac arrest. His doctors are perplexed. Although emotionally disturbed Henry Rojelio was a frequent visitor to the emergency room -- often for bouts of asthma, but usually just for attention -- no one ever anticipated a battle with death. Surgical resident Malcolm Ishmail began his medical career months before at a busy Phoenix hospital -- a far cry from the small ER deep in the silent heart of the desert, where Henry Rojelio lies. There, Malcolm fell into a secret, exhausting affair with one of his professors, Dr. Mimi Lyle, a beautiful, charismatic brain surgeon who had subtle difficulties in the operating room. In a moment of weakness "Dreamy Mimi" confessed to him her failings as a neurosurgeon; Malcolm reported her to his superiors . . . and promptly lost his job. Now, miles away from Phoenix, Dr. Ishmail struggles to save his young asthmatic patient's life and his future as a surgeon. And with little time and few clues to the cause of Henry Rojelio's sudden collapse, the impressionable doctor wonders whether his former lover may have exacted a disturbing revenge. Rich in medical detail and written with stylish, razor-sharp action and dialogue, Lie Still is a gripping, emotional drama of human failings and devastating consequences that marks the debut of a remarkable new voice. David Farris, now a pediatric anesthesiologist, has spent more than twenty years practicing obstetrics, emergency medicine, pediatric critical care, and anesthesia for high-acuity surgery. He received his medical degree from the University of California, San Diego. He lives in Portland, Oregon, with his physician-wife and their two sons, and devotes his practice primarily to infants' and children's heart surgery.
The Territory of MenBy Joelle FraserAs a child of the 60’s, Joelle Fraser was raised in the relaxed and communal environment of Sausalito’s Gate Five Marina, a then ramshackle cluster of shoddy houseboats and hippy-dippy shanties, where everything was cool and permissible – even for a 3 year old. From these beginnings, Joelle Fraser launches her wonderfully candid memoir, The Territory of Men, and allows readers insight into a life that would soon be filled with a never-ending procession of father figures. Set throughout the Pacific Northwest and Hawaii, Ms. Fraser’s coming of age story is the tender and heartbreaking tale of a young woman at constant odds with the men in her life.
WindfallsBy Jean HeglandLush, compelling, and unforgettable -- an epic tale of motherhood and an urgent narrative of vulnerability and power from the author of the acclaimed Into the Forest. Windfalls is a passionate story of motherhood -- both tender and tough -- that takes an unflinching look at the many choices facing every woman. Young and pregnant, Cerise and Anna make very different decisions about their lives. While teenage Cerise struggles to support herself and her young daughter, Anna finishes college, marries, and later gives birth to two daughters of her own. After the birth of her second child, a tragic accident tears Cerise's life apart, and she loses her already tenuous position in society. As Windfalls progresses, Cerise and Anna seem destined to approach each other, their stories dramatically interwoven. When finally their lives intersect, each woman emerges stronger, inspired by what she sees in the other, changed by what she learns. Jean Hegland's debut novel Into the Forest was "beautifully written...impeccably authentic" (Kirkus Reviews). In its successor, she delves even deeper into the human heart, taking an unflinching look at the choices facing every woman. A remarkable book from an accomplished writer, Windfalls is hard to put down and impossible to forget.
Queen Without a CountryBy Rachel BardA mysterious queen comes brilliantly alive in this new historical novel. “Queen Without a Country” is based on the life of Berengaria, queen of Richard The Lionheart of England. For centuries Berengaria has languished in the shadows. Thanks to this book, she finally gets her due. Bard’s extensive research included digging in library archives in London, Paris, and a half-dozen other French cities. The author visited every place where Berengaria lived except the Holy Land (where she went with Richard on Crusade). The resulting novel traces her life as Richard’s wife, then widow, and her struggles to make her way in a world dominated by men. With Berengaria, the reader travels across the whole turbulent landscape of twelfth- and thirteenth-century Europe, from Spain to Sicily, Cyprus, Palestine, France—but never to England, where she was their queen, because Richard never brought her. This is Bard’s first novel after eight nonfiction books ranging from travel guides to journalism textbooks to cookbooks. Her fascination with medieval queens continues. She has begun a second historical novel about Isabella of Angouleme, wife of King John of England, Richard’s brother and successor.
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