Barry Lopez Books In Order

Desert Notes

Here, for the first time in one volume, are two of Lopez’s masterpieces, River Notes and Desert Notes. From the thundering power of the river’s swift current, to the stillness of clear freshwater pools; to desert springs, birds and wind, and rattlesnakes…
and the terrible intrusion of man, Lopez allows us to share moments of intense personal experience as man tries to come to terms with the Earth’s landscape, and with his own existence.

Giving Birth to Thunder

Prankster, warrior, seducer, fool Old Man Coyote is the most enduring legend in Native American culture. Crafty and cagey often the victim of his own magical intrigues and lusty appetites he created the earth and man, scrambled the stars and first brought fire…
and death. Barry Lopez National Book Award winning author of Arctic Dreams and recipient of the John Burroughs Medal for his bestselling masterwork Of Wolves and Men has collected sixty eight tales from forty two tribes, and brings to life a timeless myth that abounds with sly wit, erotic adventure, and rueful wisdom.

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

Aflock of great blue herons descending through a snowstorm to the streets of New York…
. A river in Nebraska disappearing mysteri ously…
. 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

Field Notes

In this new collection of twelve stories, one of our most admired writers evokes the longing we feel for beauty in our relationships with one another, with the past, with nature, In these stories, we find men or women sometimes at odds with themselves, sometimes transcendently well grounded who have an experience that is profound, unsettling, and oddly liberating. In ‘Empira’s Tapestry, ‘ a gravely ill woman begins to weave a luminous cloth in which is expressed all of the fervent desire she had for her life…
In ‘Homecoming, ‘ a botanist has become so caught up with his academic ambitions that he forgets the names of the wildflowers in his own woods until his young daughter reteaches him…
And in ‘The Entreaty of the Wiideema, ‘ an anthropologist traveling with an aboriginal people finds that, because of his aggressive desire to understand them, they remain for him always disturbingly unknowable. These spare, haunting fictions, building cumulatively on each other, are marked by those qualities we have found in all of Barry Lopez’s writing: a sense of the magic and marvelous strangeness of the world, respect for disparate ways of knowing and being, compassion for the human predicament, and a vibrant hope that comes from being alert and attentive to the complex beauties of landscape. Field Notes is the final book of a loosely connected trilogy that includes Desert Notes 1976 and River Notes 1979 and stands with the best of Barry Lopez’s remarkably varied work.

Light Action in the Caribbean

Moving from fable and historical fiction to contemporary realism, this book of stories from Barry Lopez is erotic and wise, full of irresistible characters doing things they shouldn’t do for reasons that are mysterious and irreducible. In ‘The Letters of Heaven,’ a packet of recently discovered 17th century Peruvian love letters presents a 20th century man with the paralyzing choice of either protecting or exposing their stunning secret. When some young boys on the lookout for easy money get caught with a truckload of stolen horses, thievery quickly turns into redemption. For a group of convicts, a gathering of birds in the prison yard may be the key to transcendence, both figurative and literal. And, with the title story, Lopez enters a territory of unmitigated evil reminiscent of Conrad. Here are saints who shouldn’t touch, but do; sinners who insist on the life of the spirit; a postcard paradise that turns into nightmare.

Light Action in the Caribbean has already been hailed by Russell Banks as ‘tough minded, emotionally turbulent, and always intelligent.’ E. Annie Proulx describes these stories as ‘subtle and mysterious’ and says that a reader ‘cannot leave Lopez’s fictional territory unchanged.’ This is a book that breaks exciting new ground for Barry Lopez.

Vintage Lopez

Vintage Readers are a perfect introduction to some of the greatest modern writers presented in attractive, accessible paperback editions.

Lopez has such great narrative skill and uses his words so carefully the simple intensity is often nearly overwhelming. The Oregonian

Barry Lopez is an unparalleled explorer of the relationship between humanity and nature, one he limns in prose as beautiful as it is economical. His essays and short fiction have appeared everywhere from Outside to Harper’s and The Paris Review. He is the winner of a 1986 National Book Award for his bestselling Arctic Dreams.

Vintage Lopez is divided into two parts, nonfiction and fiction. It includes Landscape and Narrative ; the prologue to Arctic Dreams; and such classic short stories The Entreaty of the Wiideema and The Mappist.

Also included, for the first time in book form, the essay The Naturalist.

Resistance

From the National Book Award winning author of Arctic Dreams, a highly charged, stunningly original work of fiction a passionate response to the changes shaping our country today. In nine fictional testimonies, men and women who have resisted the mainstream and who are now suddenly parties of interest to the government tell their stories.A young woman in Buenos Aires watches bitterly as her family dissolves in betrayal and illness, but chooses to seek a new understanding of compassion rather than revenge. A carpenter traveling in India changes his life when he explodes in an act of violence out of proportion to its cause. The beginning of the end of a man’s lifelong search for coherence is sparked by a Montana grizzly. A man blinded in the war in Vietnam wrestles with the implications of his actions as a soldier and with innocence, both lost and regained. Punctuated with haunting images by acclaimed artist Alan Magee, Resistance is powerful fiction with enormous significance for our times.

Crow and Weasel

‘A brilliantly written and totally original New World adventure.’ Jean Craighead GeorgeLong ago, when people and animals spoke the same language, two young men left their tribe to make an adventurous voyage through the wilderness, into the unknown northland. Set in the mythic past and inspired by the traditions of the North American Plains people, this fable of self discovery follows Crow and Weasel as they face unfamiliar perils on a quest for knowledge and wisdom. Conquering their innermost fears, the two heroes come of age and learn more than they ever could have imagined about humanity’s relationship to the land, the importance of respecting other peoples and giving thanks, and even the ery nature of friendship itself.

Lessons from the Wolverine

In this story of spiritual adventure, by the author and illustrator of Crow and Weasel, a young man journeys through the arctic wilderness to find a family of wolverine and learn more about their mysterious power. 13 color illustrations.