Mark Lewandowski

Halibut Rodeo Mark Lewandowski

Tom Bodett once said that Homer, Alaska was "the farthest place you could go without a passport." The colorful cast of characters that inhabit this collection of interconnected stories live at the very end of the westernmost highway in North America, driven there by love and loneliness, God and greed. In the shadow of the snow capped peaks and ancient glaciers, they live out their lives-both comic and tragic-in hopes of getting through just one more day of salmon season. In this vivid, moving collection, Mark Lewandowski brings us the tough poetry of the Alaskan fishing industry, an end-of-the-world ecosystem of Slime-Line Queens and drunks, Born-Agains and sinners. Like the fish workers he describes, Lewandowski knows how to eviscerate. He peels back his characters' thick skins and removes their still-beating hearts. Halibut Rodeo is an arresting collection of stories about lonely people trying to find each other and hold on. -- Lili Wright, author of Learning to Float