The Travelers’ Tales books are meant to be a hybrid of a travel guide and a literary anthology. They won’t list all the hotels, but they might explain something deeper and otherwise harder to determine. . . . The Alaska volume is the first devoted to a U.S. state. That says something, of course, but it’s something Alaskans already know: we’re a highly imagined place, a place that spawns all sorts of hopes and fantasies, a state so big, as [contributing author] Nancy Lord points out, that it’s more than what we want to make of it.”
-- Amanda Coyne, ANCHORAGE PRESS
From ALASKA: AN INTRODUCTION, by David Roberts:
"Again and again in these tales, it is the power and peril of the wilderness that the authors celebrate. The rare exceptions -- Ellen Bielawski’s “Camping at Wal*Mart” or Mike Grudowski’s mordant portrait of Whittier -- only reinforce the centrality of wilderness in Alaskan life, by evoking parodic inversions of the myth of the limitless outback. This emphasis is not surprising. Alaska does indeed teem with some of the most magnificent and daunting backcountry on earth, on the edges of which a mere 627,000 residents (55 percent of them nestled in Anchorage and Fairbanks) cling to their livelihoods. As a result, the literature of Alaska, unlike that of, say, Tuscany or Virginia, focuses, almost obsessively on man’s (and woman’s) encounter with nature.
"[Yet] in the present collection there are twenty-six voices ranging, with a thoroughly postmodern sense of irony, across a dozen themes more ambiguous than survival or wilderness. . .
"Here is the kind of writing that, we can only hope, Alaska will provoke from her celebrants as the twenty-first century unveils new ways of comprehending the Great Land.”
Buy Travelers' Tales Alaska at wavebooks.com
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