Bellwether Prize-winner Cole pays homage to the strength and beauty of the people and landscape of her adopted home, Alaska." - Publishers Weekly (starred review)
The final collection of stories by award-winning writer Marjorie Kowalski Cole, The City Beneath the Snow is a portrait of contemporary Alaskans, their interactions, and their foibles. These stories reveal the moral decisions that lurk at unexpected corners in daily life as the characters confront a world at once magical and ordinary, joy-filled and tragic. Together, they give the reader an intimate portrait of a people and place more often portrayed through wilderness specials and reality adventure shows.
"Marjorie Kowalski Cole's characters live, work, and struggle in interior Alaska, and she depicts life here with a keen eye and with compassion. We see the daughter of a Fairbanks junkyard owner struggling with her isolation. We meet a bartender at Circle Hot Springs who's also a certified nurse's assistant at Fairbanks Memorial Hospital... These are inner lives, revealed with care and with skill, the true material of good literature."-Peggy Shumaker, Alaska State Writer Laureate
"These are indeed short stories, but each has its own unquestionable beauty... Each story in The City Beneath the Snow begs re-reading, whether to absorb the poetic prose once more, or to attempt to resolve an ending that left a question mark. The characters are real, their situations elicit compassion, and Cole's writing deserves to be savored." - Foreword ReviewsAutorentext
Marjorie Kowalski Cole (1953-2009) was a prodigious writer of fiction, essays, and poetry, including the Bellwether Prize-winning book Correcting the Landscape; Inside, Outside, Morningside, and A Spell on the Water.