The Souls of Others - by Shann Ray (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

The Souls of Others is a powerful essay collection by American Book Award winner Shann Ray. Ray depicts the American west as both magnificent and destitute. The mountains are alive. The people are gritty, destitute, and resilient. Nature offers its bounty but never gives it with ease. Ray, having spent part of his childhood on the Northern Cheyenne reservation, expertly paints a place of family, sorrow, and a connection to Mother Nature that so many Americans have lost.

Review Quotes

Shann Ray's prose brings to mind Cormac McCarthy and Annie Proulx but is, thankfully, entirely his own. His work is lyrical, prophetic, brutal yet ultimately hopeful. -Dave Eggers, author of What is the What

Shann Ray hones the cutting edge between desire and need, despair and beauty. I am reminded once again of what it means to encounter genuine grace." -Clair Davis, author of Labors of the Heart

Ray writes with an unsettling power. -Benjamin Percy, for Esquire

In the work of Shann Ray I find the beauty I knew and lost and know now again. I find, too, the hunger and loss and piercing darkness, that which we must admit before we move on. I find a soul-igniting belief in history, honesty, wilderness, and forgiveness. I wish as a boy in Montana I could have turned to Ray as one of my teachers, as I do now. I wish I would have been able, all those years ago, to hold these essays--like maps, like wisdom songs--in hand. -Joe Wilkins, from the foreword, author of When We Were Birds

Shann Ray's work is both grounded and spiritual. He has an eye for minute detail, and while he's describing an act of love or violence or just panning through a scene to render river and mountain range, he's also trying to understand how we respond to the often generational brutality of existence without forgetting its beauty. -Luke Baumgarten, Terrain, & Treatment/Creative