TORREY HOUSE PRESS

NEW AND UPCOMING

 

ACCIDENTALS

by Susan M. Gaines

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When Gabriel’s mother decides to repatriate to her native Uruguay after thirty years in California, he takes a break from his uninspiring desk job to accompany her. At first, Gabe observes his mother’s squabbling family in the same detached way he watches the new species of birds he encounters in the marsh on their land—but when he falls in love with a local biologist, he is transformed from observer to main character in his family’s transnational saga. As Gabe and Alejandra struggle to confront the environmental devastation of their twenty-first-century future, they find themselves mired in the mud of their parents’—and their countries’—Cold War-era past.

MARCH 2020

 

AMERICAN ZION

Cliven Bundy, God, & Public Lands
in the West

by Betsy Gaines Quammen

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What happens when members of an American religion—one built in the nineteenth century on personal prophecy and land proprietorship—assert possession over western federal lands, armed with guns and a certainty that God wants them to go to war? American Zion is the story of the ongoing feud between Mormon ranching family the Bundys, the federal government, and the American public. Historian Betsy Gaines Quammen examines the roots of the Bundys’ cowboy confrontations, and how history has shaped an often-dangerous mindset which today feeds the militia movement and threatens public lands, wild species, and American heritage.

MARCH 2020

 

A HISTORY OF KINDNESS

Poems

by Linda Hogan

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Poems from Linda Hogan explore new and old ways of experiencing the vagaries of the body and existing in harmony with earth’s living beings.

JUNE 2020

 

MONARCHS OF THE
NORTHEAST KINGDOM

by Chera Hammons

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Anna and her husband John, a master saddlemaker, have created a quiet existence for themselves in rural Vermont. When John disappears in the woods near their home, Anna hides what she finds there in a desperate effort to ensure her own survival. She must learn to live alone in a landscape where poachers trespass, coyotes roam, bears menace livestock, and winter starves the wild animals—while debilitating illness and long-buried secrets threaten to upturn her life.

AUGUST 2020

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THIS DESERT HIDES NOTHING

photos by Stephen Strom
and words by Ellen Meloy

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Writer and naturalist Ellen Meloy and photographer Stephen Strom met in the fall of 2004 and began work on a book of images and prose expressing their shared love of the desert. Two months later, Meloy died suddenly at her home in southern Utah. Over the years to follow, Strom called on Meloy’s writing to put his new photographs to words. The collaboration seemed to deepen over time, and it comes to fruition in This Desert Hides Nothing, edited by poet Ann Walka, a friend of Ellen Meloy.

SEPTEMBER 2020

 

MESA VERDE VICTIM

by Scott Graham

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​Hounded by false accusations of murder, archaeologist Chuck Bender and his family risk their lives to track down an unknown killer on the loose in a rugged canyon on the remote western edge of Mesa Verde National Park, where ancient stone villages and secret burial sites, abandoned centuries ago by the Ancestral Puebloan people, harbor artifacts so rare and precious they're worth killing over.

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AUGUST 2020

 

BEHIND THE BEARS EARS:

Exploring the Cultural and Natural Histories of a Sacred Landscape

by R. E. Burillo

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For more than 12,000 years, the wondrous landscape of southeastern Utah has defined the histories, cultures, and lives of everyone who calls it home. Archaeologist and conservationist R.E. Burrillo takes readers on a journey of discovery through the stories and controversies that make this place so unique, from traces of its earliest inhabitants through its role in shaping the study of Southwest archaeology itself—and into the modern battle over its protection.  

OCTOBER 2020

 

TO THE MOUNTAIN

a novel by Erik Raschke

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Eleven-year-old Marshall lives in a remote juvenile center in Colorado, where he is bullied by the other boys, misunderstood by all of the staff except Leslie, and so overwhelmed by the sounds and smells in the cafeteria that getting his lunch is a daily terror. During a blizzard, an unexpected mishap for Marshall and Leslie leads to Marshall’s disappearance into the wilderness. His father, Jace, knows that Marshall has gone searching for a secret on the mountain. To save Marshall, Jace must overcome not only the winter elements, but his own self-doubt in this tale of sacrifice, hope, and the bond between father and son.

FEBRUARY 2021

 

AIR MAIL: 

Letters of Politics, Pandemics, and Place

by Amy Irvine and Pam Houston

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When the state of Colorado ordered its residents to shelter in place in response to the spread of coronavirus, writers Pam Houston and Amy Irvine—who had never met—began a correspondence based on their shared devotion to the rugged, windswept mountains that surround their homes, one on either side of the Continental Divide. As the numbers of infected and dead rose and the nation split dangerously over the crisis, Houston and Irvine found their letters to one another as necessary as breath. Part tribute to wilderness, part indictment against tyranny and greed, Air Mail: Letters of Politics, Pandemics, and Place reveals the evolution of a friendship that galvanizes as it chronicles a strange new world. 

OCTOBER 2020

 

DESERT CHROME:
Water, a Woman & Wild Horses in the West

by Kathryn Wilder

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Kathryn Wilder’s personal story of grief, motherhood, and return to the desert entwines with the story of mustangs as she makes a home on the Colorado Plateau on property bordering a BLM herd management area. Desert Chrome illuminates these controversial creatures—their plight, what they mean to us, and what can be done to help both habitat and horses stay healthy and wild—and celebrates the animal nature in us all.     

MAY 2021

 

PROCESSED MEATS

by Nicole Walker

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Nicole Walker made cheese and grew tomatoes as a means of coping when she failed to get pregnant. Her Mormon ancestors canned peaches to prepare for the End of Days and congealed beef broth into aspic as a surefire cure for ailment. Throughout the richly layered essays of Processed Meats, Walker ponders the ways we process disaster, repackage it, and turn it into something edible.  

MARCH 2021

 

STANDOFF

by Jacqueline Keeler

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The Bundy takeover of Oregon’s Malheur Wildlife Refuge and the Standing Rock Sioux tribe’s standoff against an oil pipeline in North Dakota are two sides of the same story that created America and its deep-rooted cultural conflicts. Through a compelling comparison of conflicting beliefs and legal systems, Keeler explores whether the West has really been won—and for whom. 

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MARCH 2021

 

BLOSSOM AS THE CLIFFROSE

edited by Karin Anderson and Danielle Dubrasky

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Blossom as the Cliffrose features original poems and prose by talented writers who are faithful, non-faithful, believers, heretics, converts and de-converts, dragged in or forced out of the Mormon faith. This dynamic collection demonstrates the breadth, complexity, and diversity of a Latter-day Saint legacy of commitment to natural place and challenges us to examine the myriad ways our own deeply rooted heritage shapes our personal relationship with landscape.

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JUNE 2021

 

SAGEBRUSH EMPIRE

by Jonathan P. Thompson

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San Juan County, Utah, contains some of the most spectacular landscapes in the world, rich in culture and history. But it’s also long been plagued with racism, bitterness, and politics as twisted as the canyons. Award-winning journalist Jonathan P. Thompson explores the redrock canyons and  this corner of the western United States, which for five decades has been at the center of the American public lands wars.

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AUGUST 2021

 

QUIET DESPERATION, SAVAGE DELIGHT

by David Gessner

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When the pandemic struck, nature writer David Gessner turned to Henry David Thoreau, the original social distancer, for lessons on how to live. Those lessons—of learning our own backyard, re-wilding, loving nature, self-reliance, and civil disobedience—hold a secret that could help save us as we face the greater crisis of climate.

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MAY 2021

 

CANYONLANDS CARNAGE

by Scott Graham

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When suspicious deaths befall a whitewater rafting expedition through Cataract Canyon in Canyonlands National Park, archaeologist Chuck Bender and his family recognize evil intent lies behind the tragedies. They must risk their lives and act before the murderer makes an already deadly journey on the Colorado River through Utah's red rock wilderness even deadlier—or turns on them instead.

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SEPTEMBER 2021

 

DEAD SERIOUS

by Eli J. Knapp

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Through personal stories of mishap and adventure, historical vignettes, and scenic detours, professor Eli J. Knapp dissects eighteen critical forces that lie behind the earth's sixth extinction. Drawing from experiences across the globe, Knapp peeks into odd and overlooked corners of natural history, showing how ocean-going tortoises and ghost deer can both instruct and inspire. Full of humor, hope, and self-effacing scientific savvy, Knapp's exploration of our home planet provides welcome respite in a deadly serious subject.

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JUNE 2021