Living in Southern Oregon, not far north of where Ash Davidson’s Damnation Spring is set, I’ve grown used to passing trucks that are overloaded with timber, and mountainsides bare from clear-cuts. Knowing that this novel is about logging redwoods in the late 1970s, I wasn’t sure how biased I might be, as an reader who is decidedly …
Set on the Gulf Coast of Mississippi in the span of the twelve days before, during, and after Hurricane Katrina makes landfall, Salvage the Bones is the story of 14-year-old Esch and her family, who live on the outskirts of the fictional town of Bois Sauvage on a patch of land they call the “Pit.” …
Charlotte McConaghy, an Australian writer living in Sydney, is the author of Migrations and Once There Were Wolves. Here, she chats with EcoLit Books about her new novel about the reintroduction of wolves to the Scottish Highlands. Q: As with the birds in Migrations, your characters in Once There Were Wolves have a deep knowledge of the animals …
Charlotte McConaghy’s Once There Were Wolves shares much in common with her previous novel, Migrations — the journey of a troubled young woman hoping to save the animals she loves, while also fighting the demons of her past. Yet despite these echoes, Once There Were Wolves is entirely unique in its story of biologist Inti Flynn, who …
ASLE (The Association for the Study of Literature and Environment) is holding its conference online from July 26 to August 6. Keynote presentations include: Aimee Nezhukumatathil, poet and author of World of Wonders Brionté McCorkle, Executive Director of Georgia Conservation Voters Anthropologist and geographer Zoe Todd and sound artist AM Kanngieser, collaborating on “Environmental Kin …
I didn’t plan to read the nonfiction book Dark Emu shortly before reading the novel The Yield by Tara June Winch. But I couldn’t think of a better pairing. While Dark Emu deconstructs colonial myths about Australian Aboriginal civilizations, The Yield illustrates how these myths were used to justify tearing apart families and cultures. In …
How about a new writing contest to kick off 2021? This one is sponsored by Grist and looks very interesting (and timely): Welcome to Imagine 2200 — a new climate-fiction contest by Fix, Grist’s solutions lab. What we’re seeking: short stories that envision the next 180 years of equitable climate progress. What we’re offering: $8,700 …
Not surprisingly, we’ve been doing quite a bit of reading this year. Here are some of our favorite books. And not all of them were new in 2020. We reviewed Braiding Sweetgrass back in 2019, and it’s comforting to see that book rise to the top of our collective consciousness (a seven-year old overnight success …
Our friends Mary Woodbury of Dragonfly.eco and Lovis Geir from Ecofictology have partnered to create a virtual community of writers and readers passionate about environmental literature. The network is hosted on Discord and you are invited to join. Here’s more about Rewilding Our Stories: Rewilding Our Stories is a safe place for readers, writers, publishers…basically …
Last year, we published Three Ways to Disappear, winner of the 2016 Siskiyou Prize for New Environmental Literature (it was also a finalist for the Dzanc Books Disquiet Open Borders Book Prize and the UNO Press Publishing Lab Prize). The novel is a story of sisters but also a story of India, and an endangered species …
This is our third year of recapping the best books we’ve read over the past year. Here are the 2017 and 2016 lists. We’re so glad that the number of both readers and reviewers of EcoLit Books have grown enough to now have an annual tradition of celebrating our favorite books of the year. And …
