Winter Count

"Perfectly crafted. . . . [These] stories expand of their own accord, lingering in the mind the way intense light lingers in the retina." -- Los Angeles Times "Animals and landscapes have not had this weight, this precision, in American fiction since Hemingway's young heroes were fishing the streams of upper Michigan and Spain." -- San Francisco Chronicle A flock of great blue herons descending through a snowstorm to the streets of New York. . . . A river in Nebraska disappearing mysteriously. . . . A ghostly herd of buffalo that sings a song of death. . . . A mystic who raises constellations of stones from the desert floor. . . . All these are to be found in Winter Count , the exquisite and rapturous collection by the National Book Award-winning author of Arctic Dreams . In these resonant and unpredictable stories Barry Lopez proves that he is one of the most important and original writers at work in America today. With breathtaking skill and a few deft strokes he produces painfully beautiful scenes. Combining the real with the wondrous, he offers us a pure vision of people alive to the immediacy and spiritual truth of nature. "Powerful. . . . [Lopez] can steal your breath away." -- Minneapolis Tribune "Richly allusive, moving, compassionate, these stories celebrate the web of nature that holds the world together." -- The Philadelphia Inquirer