Join us at this year’s Texas Book Festival for a conversation between Ethan Rutherford, author of North Sun, Yume Kitasei, and Emma Sloley.
What is left of the world in the aftermath of destruction, greed, and neglect? Yume Kitasei, Emma Sloley, and Ethan Rutherford search for an answer in their blistering novels. In Saltcrop, Kitasei follows two sisters on an epic voyage across oceans to find their lost sister, offering a meaningful exploration of family bonds, environmental disasters, and corporate greed. In The Island of Last Things, Sloley takes readers on a whirlwind adventure to a world of political unrest and environmental ruin, centered on two zookeepers and their bond with each other and the animals they nurture. In North Sun, Rutherford probes into the nineteenth-century American whaling industry in an experimental narrative as beautiful as it is harrowing.
Setting out from New Bedford in 1878, the crew of the Esther is confident the sea will be theirs: in addition to cruising the Pacific for whale, they intend to hunt the teeming northern grounds before the ice closes. But as they sail to their final destination in the Chukchi Sea, where their captain Arnold Lovejoy has an urgent directive of his own to attend to, their encounters with the natural world become more brutal, harrowing, ghostly, and strange.
With one foot firmly planted in the traditional sea-voyage narrative, and another in a blazing mythos of its own, this debut novel looks unsparingly at the cost of environmental exploitation and predation, and in doing so feverishly sings not only of the past, but to the present and future as well.
Ethan Rutherford’s fiction has appeared in BOMB, Tin House, Electric Literature, Ploughshares, One Story, American Short Fiction, Conjunctions, and The Best American Short Stories. He is the author of two story collections—Farthest South (Deep Vellum, 2020) and The Peripatetic Coffin and Other Stories (Ecco, 2013)—and for these works has been named a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction, a finalist for the John Leonard Prize and CLMP’s Firecracker Award, received honorable mention for the PEN/Hemingway Award, was a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers selection, and was the winner of a Minnesota Book Award. Born in Seattle, Washington, he received his MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Minnesota and now teaches Creative Writing at Trinity College. He lives in Hartford, Connecticut with his wife and two children.