TORREY HOUSE PRESS

NEW AND UPCOMING

 

VIRGA & BONE

by Craig Childs

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From the author of The Secret Knowledge of Water and Atlas of a Lost World comes a deeply felt essay collection focusing upon a vivid series of desert icons—a half-blind bighorn ram, a sheet of virga over Monument Valley, solitude on the Green River. Craig Childs delves into the primacy of the land and the profound nature of the more-than-human.

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OCTOBER 2019

 

CONFLUENCE

by Zak Podmore

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In the wake of his river-running mother’s death, Zak Podmore illustrates the healing power of wild places through a lens of grief and regeneration. Visceral, first-person narratives include a canoe crossing of the Colorado River delta during a rare release of water, a kayak sprint down a flash-flooding Little Colorado River to the site of a proposed tourist development, and a packraft trip on the Elwha River in Washington through the largest dam removal project in history.

OCTOBER 2019

 

SHAPED BY SNOW

by Ayja Bounous

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Shaped by Snow examines Bounous's personal and family connections to snow and skiing and how climate change threatens both the mountain and the relationships that shape her.

NOVEMBER 2019

 

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

 

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.

NOVEMBER 2020

 

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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FEBRUARY 2021

 

PROCESSED MEATS

by Nicole Walker

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MARCH 2021