Tonino’s infectious love of the outdoors…should inspire us to explore the places just outside our own front door. —E/The Environmental Magazine
From the publisher: At eighteen, Vermont native Leath Tonino ventured west to attend college in Colorado. Upon hearing his destination, many of Tonino’s friends and family predicted that he’d never come back; he’d make the “land of endless space and sky, its ranges and their storms” his home. “The West will swallow you,” one said, in a tone that felt like part warning and part prophecy.
More than a decade later Tonino continues to call Vermont his home. But despite his love of New England and his admiration for writers who sing the praises of their native ground, he concedes that he is, as Gary Snyder once phrased it, “promiscuous with landscapes.” Tonino has spent the intervening years since college traversing “the alphabet of the American West from AZ to CA to UT to WY” and writing about its mysterious and powerful beauty. The resulting musings are collected in The West Will Swallow You, the title of which is a nod to words that, in many ways, turned out to be true.
Leath Tonino, a writer from Vermont, has also worked as a wildlife biologist in Arizona, a blueberry farmer in New Jersey, and a snow shoveler in Antarctica. His essays, reported stories, and interviews appear in magazines such as Outside, Men’s Journal, Orion, Tricycle, Utne Reader, The Sun, and NER 33.3, and his essay “Beach Reading” was recently featured on NER Digital.
The West Will Swallow You can be purchased from Trinity University Press or from your local bookstore.
From the publisher: Erich Ambrose fools people for a living. It’s a family tradition. But when a party stunt goes disastrously wrong, he finds himself in deep trouble, on the run through Chicago streets and northern woods, matching wits with the FBI and national security agents and money launderers, all while trying to please a violent homecoming queen and a badass rabbit. Humorous and probing, Bring Me the Head of Mr. Boots is a story of how our past haunts the present, and how the cruelest tricks are the ones we play on ourselves.
Chalres Holdefer, author of five novels, including Magic Even You Can Do: By Blast (2019) and Dick Cheney in Shorts (2017), grew up in Iowa and is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and the Sorbonne. He currently teaches at the University of Poitiers, France. His short fiction and essays have appeared in magazines including New England Review, Chicago Quarterly Review, North American Review, Los Angeles Review, The Antioch Review, World Literature Today, and New York Journal of Books, and his story “The Raptor” won a Pushcart Prize. His essay “Orwell’s Hippopotamus, or The Writer as Historical Anachronism” was published in NER 32.3, and his short story “Big and Nasty” appeared in NER 37.1.
Bring Me the Head of Mr. Boots can be purchased at SPD Books or your local independent bookseller.