MAXIMILIAN WERNER
MAXIMILIAN WERNER is an award-winning author of three books: Black River Dreams, a collection of literary fly-fishing essays, the novel Crooked Creek, and the memoir Gravity Hill. Werner’s poems, fiction, creative nonfiction, and essays have appeared in several journals and magazines, including Matter Journal: Edward Abbey Edition, Bright Lights Film Journal, The North American Review, ISLE, Weber Studies, Fly Rod and Reel, and Columbia. He lives in Salt Lake City and teaches writing at the University of Utah.
BOOKS BY THE AUTHOR
EVOLVED
Chronicles of a Pleistocene Mind
From which side of the bed you sleep on to where to play a backyard game of hide-and-go-seek, Maximilian Werner examines elements of everyday behavior through the eye-opening lens of evolutionary theory in this memoir-infused nonfiction. Werner applies an intriguingly fresh take to seldom-explored habits of humans and animals alike, guiding readers backward in time to the Pleistocene.
“Werner makes evolutionary theory accessible through case studies of both human and nonhuman subjects, teaching us how immersed all living creatures still are in the things that made the difference between life and death hundreds of generations ago.”
—SALT LAKE CITY WEEKLY
CROOKED CREEK
A Novel
Sara and Preston, along with Sara’s clairvoyant brother Jasper, flee Arizona when they run afoul of American Indian artifact hunters. They arrive in Utah’s Heber Valley seeking shelter with Sara’s uncle, but they soon learn that they cannot escape the burden of memory or the crimes of the past. Set in the late 19th century, this rich, layered story resonates with the work of such authors as Cormac McCarthy and Wallace Stegner.
“Here in the deep measured prose of Max Werner is a western story, harsh and lush as the old world it depicts. Crooked Creek shows again that one of the natural laws of the wilderness–along with wind and stone and animals and family — is violence.
—RON CARLSON, author of The Signal