The City Beneath the Snow

Book excerpt: Bellwether Prize-winner Cole pays homage to the strength and beauty of the people and landscape of her adopted home, Alaska.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review) The final collection of stories by award-winning writer Marjorie Kowalski Cole, The City Beneath the Snow is a portrait of contemporary Alaskans, their interactions, and their foibles. These stories reveal the moral decisions that lurk at unexpected corners in daily life as the characters confront a world at once magical and ordinary, joy-filled and tragic. Together, they give the reader an intimate portrait of a people and place more often portrayed through wilderness specials and reality adventure shows. “Marjorie Kowalski Cole’s characters live, work, and struggle in interior Alaska, and she depicts life here with a keen eye and with compassion. We see the daughter of a Fairbanks junkyard owner struggling with her isolation. We meet a bartender at Circle Hot Springs who’s also a certified nurse’s assistant at Fairbanks Memorial Hospital . . . These are inner lives, revealed with care and with skill, the true material of good literature.”—Peggy Shumaker, Alaska State Writer Laureate “These are indeed short stories, but each has its own unquestionable beauty . . . Each story in The City Beneath the Snow begs re-reading, whether to absorb the poetic prose once more, or to attempt to resolve an ending that left a question mark. The characters are real, their situations elicit compassion, and Cole’s writing deserves to be savored.” —Foreword Reviews