Little Wolves by Thomas Maltman (English) Paperback Book

Description: Little Wolves by Thomas Maltman Second novel from Alex Award-winning author of The Night Birds which was a strong Soho seller.In this haunting blend of myth, reality, and prairie horror, the repercussions of a heinous murder echo through a small Minnesota town.A modern classic of the Midwest, from Alex Award Winner Thomas Maltman."An ambitious mythic thriller that hums with energy and portent."-Leif Enger, author of Virgil WanderSouthern Minnesota, 1980s. A drought season is pushing family farms to the brink in Lone Mountain when Seth Fallon, a teenage boy, murders the local sheriff and then shoots himself. In the wake of his sons violent act, his father decides to look for answers. His search leads him to form an unlikely connection to Clara, his sons teacher, who has recently returned to Lone Mountain for reasons of her own- to learn the truth behind the old myths and dark folklore she was raised on, which she suspects hold a devastating truth about her past, as well as the town itself.Little Wolves is a penetrating look at small-town America from the award-winning author of The Night Birds as well as a powerful murder mystery woven with elements of folklore, Norse mythology, and horror. FORMAT Paperback LANGUAGE English CONDITION Brand New Author Biography Thomas Maltmanis the author of the novelsThe Night Birds,Little Wolves,The Land and Ashes to Ashes. He has won an Alex Award, a Spur Award, and the Friends of American Writers Literary Award, and his work has been an Indie Next and All Iowa Reads selection. He has an MFA from Minnesota State University, Mankato, teaches at Normandale Community College, and lives in the Twin Cities area. Review Praise for Little WolvesAn ABA Indie Next SelectionOne of School Library Journals "Best 2013 Adult Books 4 Teens""Heres one Ill recommend—Tom Maltmans written an ambitious mythic thriller that hums with energy and portent. Set under brooding prairie skies, Little Wolves has modern psychoses and generational wickedness, ravening devils and uneasy saints. It shifts and dodges like wind, and it rings with conviction and confidence. What more can a reader ask?"—Leif Enger, author of Peace Like a River"Satisfying on so many levels . . . heartbreakingly real. This unpretentious tale of life in rural Minnesota is writing at its finest."—William Kent Krueger, New York Times bestseller and winner of the Edgar award"Took my breath away . . . as rich in myth and metaphors as Cormac McCarthys The Road."—Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel"Part allegory, part mystery and pure poetry, layered with Norse mythology and Anglo Saxon narratives, Maltmans second novel is dark, redemptive and very beautiful."—Minneapolis Star-Tribune"A dark and penetrating novel."—Des Moines Register"So good, youll forget about icy sidewalks and a dead battery . . . Magical story, magical writing."—Saint Paul Pioneer Press"At its heart, Little Wolves is a powerful mystery . . . Maltman combines mythology and small-town claustrophobia to show how the roots of the violence [are] planted."—Christian Science Monitor"A complicated portrait of a prairie town, a meditation on violence, a fantasia of myth and folklore, and a knockout murder mystery, Little Wolves is haunting, at times terrifying, a gothic cousin to Kent Harufs Plainsong. I loved this book."—Benjamin Percy, author of Red Moon"A work of nuance, craft, and tightly plotted narrative . . . Little Wolves is a portrait of two individuals seeking solace through religion and the law, and finding every opportunity thwarted by that most central tenet of Americana: nostalgia."—Rain Taxi"A powerful mix of tragedy, myth, psychological thriller, and discovery told in a style so engaging that the reader might easily get caught up in the beauty of the words if the story itself were not so stunning."—Library Journal Starred Review"Layered with literary and mythic allusions . . . A satisfying and unforgettable read."—School Library Journal"A masterwork of fiction. Not just a good book thats interesting on multiple levels, but a great book that will stand the test of time . . . I was completely spellbound. Add to this the mysteries surrounding the town and characters, and I felt, often, as though I were reading some contemporary version of Dostoyevsky."—Peter Geye, author of Safe From The Sea"Little Wolves weaves the lives of a father, a son, a pastors wife, and a community in this compelling mystery of murder and secrets. His brilliant use of historical and mythical elements are combined with everyday life in ways that are hair-raising and true. Maltman has a gift for framing unforgettable characters. Everything about this book asks us to examine life more closely." —Elizabeth Cox, Author of The Slow Moon"This novel churns with the tension of a building prairie thunderstorm. Tom Maltman knows that dark truths can be hidden under open skies, and he knows the secrets of the bloodstained ax in the barn."—John Reimringer, author of Vestments"The poetry of this prose and the suspense of the plot, along with the intensity of characterization will have many readers comparing Thomas Maltman to Cormac McCarthy—that greatest of compliments—for very good reason. This novel is a work of high art by the real thing."—Laura Kasischke, author of Space, in Chains and The Life Before Her Eyes"Absolutely fantastic. Unnerving, gorgeously written . . . The writing is haunting."—Caroline Leavitt, author of Pictures of You"Powerful . . . skillfully evoked"—Publishers Weekly "Maltman makes his leading characters so sensitive that you may shudder at the same revelations that so appall them."—Kirkus"Little Wolves is beautifully written, both in the style of prose and pacing of the narrative."—Grand Rapids Herald-Review "Maltman expertly weaves a narrow thread of mysticism into the story . . . Thomas Maltman is a master wordsmith and storyteller. He seasons this story with the perfect amount of every ingredient. There is literally never a dull moment in this book."—Coastal Breeze News"In gorgeous prose, Maltman conjures both the irrational suspicion and the heartwarming connections forged in a small town during times of trauma."—Booklist"Little Wolves is reminiscent of Kent Harufs Plainsong, but grittier . . . a great read with loads of literary merit."—BookSquawk"Thomas Maltman combines Norse mythology, fairy tales, and other elements of folklore to create a dark tale of hatred and deceit."—Ted Hertel, Deadly Pleasures"Saturated with violence, Anglo-Saxon mythology and parochial pettiness, Maltmans novel is an unsettling work of first-rate fiction."—Shelf-Awareness"[Maltman] hit the ground running with Night Birds and has now given us another award-worthy novel . . . You will be drawn into the intriguing murder plot, of course, but you will also be captivated by Maltmans lyrical prose, adept storytelling, and artistic rendering of the moody Midwestern prairie of the 1980s. Maltman has done for the Midwest what Steinbeck did for the Salinas Valley."—Bev Denor, LaDeDa Book"Maltmans prose is vivid and evocative, rendering place and event in striking images . . . This is a novel to be shared and savored, fiction at its finest, infused with tragedy and truth."—Curled Up with a Good Book (blog)"Little Wolves was a wonderful listen, perfect for these cold moody winter days."—The Guilded Earlobe (blog)"With Little Wolves, Maltman weaves a beautiful, bewildering cloth . . . We care enough to circle these stranded questions hours, days, even weeks after we have closed the book."—Flyway (blog)Praise for The Night BirdsAlex Award Winner "We all set our sights on the Great American Novel . . . [Thomas Maltman] comes impressively close to laying his hands on the grail."—Madison Smartt Bell, Boston Globe "Thomas Maltmans debut novel, The Night Birds, soars and sings like a feathered angel."—Chicago Sun-Times Review Quote Selected as an "INDIE NEXT" Praise for Excerpt from Book Book One The Wolfing She heard him from the mountain, a voice high and thin, breaking the nights quiet. The cry was such as her own children made when she was gone too long searching for food to bring back to the den. It was the cry of something blind and helpless, a cry of hunger. She heard it and she could do no other thing but go toward it. How it came to be alone in the tallgrass is a story for another time. She heard it with her sharp pointed ears and smelled it with her sharp black nose. Her nose told her the truth. It was not a wolf pup but a human baby, alone on a bed of prairie grass under the starry dark. She smelled on the breeze the horses that had come and gone, running hard. They had run away pulling a wagon that scarred deep ruts in the grass. Her paws stepped in these ruts, found the gouges the horses had torn from the prairie. She paused, suspicious, and sniffed the ground and raised her nose and sniffed the wind. They had been here, but they were gone, except the baby. In the torn grass she smelled the fear on the horses and in the air she smelled something burning. She knew the ways of the wind and fire out on the prairie. The fire was a breathing thing, ever hungry. The fire would be here soon and find where the baby lay in his nest of grass. She could not resist his crying because she was a First Mother who had birthed many children, and there were no others like her in this valley that smelled of smoke and terror. Her children had grown fat and happy until the coming of the Trapper the past moon, the Trapper who had killed her Mate, scattering the others, and then found the den where she had hidden her pups away. The cries of the human baby traveled through the night and found her ears and went into her ears and into her blood. The cries opened up places inside her that had not yet gone dry, where milk recently flowed from her nipples to feed her pups and make them strong. It hurt to make milk again. The coyote was skinny and mangy, her ribs poking from her pelt, and she needed food for herself, a plump mouse or jackrabbit. Here was this thing wrapped in a white cloth under the night sky. It had fallen from the running horses but the soft grasses had broken the fall. The running horses had not stopped for it. The child might as well have come from the stars themselves. And now it was alone here as she was alone. She did not think what to do, even if the baby bore the same tainted smell as the Trapper. Her body had told her when the milk rinsed out of her. She went toward it, sniffing tentatively at the corner of the cloth, and then touched the babys soft skin with her wet black nose. The baby quit crying. It gurgled, shocked. The coyote licked it with her tongue and tasted the salty skin. If she had not been a First Mother, if another of her kind had found this pink bundle in the grass, the story might have been different. She stood over the child and crouched down so that it might reach her nipples and suckle. Yes, it hurt to make milk again. Her milk flowed out of her, emptying her of all she had to give, but her heart was full, as full as the night sky above. When the child was done feeding she opened her jaws, clenched the white cloth, and lifted the child from the grass. She carried him away from the smell of burning where the prairie grasses would soon blossom with flames. The child rocked to and fro in his hammock of cloth. She took him in this manner to the place she called home, the mountain from which she had first heard his cries, the mountain where she had been alone for a time, but not any longer. * Her father had told her many stories, and this was just one, the one that reached furthest back into history, when settlers had gone to war with the Indians, and after the massacre, one child was saved by a feral mother. Her father told stories of a giant who lived inside a mountain, of wolves and lost children and the monsters they later became. The stories he told were the only answer he had for the absence of her mother. Though he never said so outright, they were about a childhood place he would never see again. She did not set them down on paper until after her father died and she herself was six months pregnant, a pastors wife, a stranger living in a small town. Her hand shook as she wrote the words. She was in the room that was to be the nursery, and it was bare except for a small desk she planned to use as a changing table and the rocking chair where she sat with a spiral notebook spread open on her lap. Aqua-colored light soaked the room from blue curtains drawn across the window. Yesterday, one of her students had rung the doorbell while she was down in the basement. She had looked up through a grimy basement window and beheld tennis shoes and the ragged edge of a coat. She saw the legs of this scarecrow figure and nothing more. He rang and rang that bell, and she just stood rooted there. A cold hand touched her shoulder, bidding her to stay. Even the baby she carried inside her was still and waiting. The bell kept ringing in her brain a long time after the figure in the coat went away. And now the bells were ringing at church next door, as though this were any other Sunday, but she would not be joining her husband in the sanctuary. As pastors wife she did not want to face the congregation after what had happened. Her husbands parishioners would greet her and smile. They desperately needed good news, and she was it. How are you? The baby? They would lay hands on her. The child was not hers alo≠ it belonged to them as well. They would touch her hair as though she had returned from the dead. They would speak once more of angels. No. She needed to be alone here. She opened her notebook and began to write, balancing it on one knee. She could hear organ music and recognized the strains of "This Is My Fathers World" as the service began. Quaking voices. Such a gift, this murmur in her blood. The rocking soothed her, as did the words she scratched on the page with a fountain pen, a Montblanc Meiserstruck her father had given her when she graduated from high school. Late last night she had seen the coyotes, three of them emerging from the cornfield late after dark. They did not howl at first but entered the cemetery behind the church with a short series of yips and barks, one and then the other, their calls braiding into a chorus, until eventually one howled in a language that was part of the great outer darkness. The coyotes werent supposed to be here; they were searching for something. They had come from the lone mountain like a storybook curse and roused the town with their plaintive singing, vanishing by daylight. Clara Warrens hand shook as she marked the words on the page because she knew she was trapped inside of one of her fathers stories, and the only way out was to write it down. She wrote as if her life depended on it, and maybe it did. The Boy The day before, Seth Fallon limped toward town under a boiled-blue sky, a dry wind trailing him from the fields. Despite the heat he wore a long, oilcloth coat hed taken from the mudroom, and inside the coat he had the twelve gauge his father had given him last Christmas, with the promise they would hunt whitetail in the swamp come fall. Earlier that morning he had taken the shotgun into the shop, clasped it in a vice, and sawed off precisely seven inches. Then he sanded down the bore, oiled the barrel, shined it with a rag, and leaned the gun against the door, so he could tidy what mess he had made, discarding the sawn barrel in the trash and sweeping steel scrapings from the concrete floor. He hung the saw back on its hook, folded the cloth in a neat square, and stored it with the gun oil in a metal cabinet. When he left everything was in its place, just as his father had raised him to do. Barely a scratch of rain had fallen in two months the Saturday afternoon he set out for town. A summer of drought baked the crop in the furrows, leaving whole rows sere and stunted, so that the wind gnawed at what remained and lifted a fine scrim of topsoil from the fields and flung it against the outbuildings. He walked with this wind under a sun that was a cinder in a vacant sky, the gun cool against his ribs. The farthest he had ever traveled from this valley was across the state border to Sioux Falls. This was the only home he had ever known. The town of Lone Mountain perched along terraced streets overlooking the surrounding valley, a half mile wide and thickly wooded on either side. For aeons the Minnesota River had been at work eating through topsoil toward the earths core, carving out this place from vast prairie farmlands stretching hundreds of miles all around. The valley had been a place of both shadow and shelter for generations of Indians--the Cheyenne, the Fox and Sauk, the Dakotas--all who came to hide from the winter winds on the prairie. Only the ghosts of the Indians remained, but these were potent ghosts with no love for the Germans who had stolen their land following a summer of war a hundred years before, and when a little girl drowned in the river, the old-timers crossed themselves and thought of the brown hands that surely pulled her under. They later said such a ghost moved in the boy, an angry spirit urging him on. Such darkness could not have come from one of their own. They had lived here for generations after traveling across the Atlantic b Description for Sales People A much-anticipated second novel from Thomas Maltman, author of the highly-praised book The Night Waves (2007, Soho). Set in an atmospheric small-town American environment, this will appeal to fans of Russell Banks. The Night Waves was warmly received by reviewers, earning accolades from the Boston Globe and the Chicago Sun-Times. Little Wolves has been praised by numerous authors, including Elizabeth Cox, Caroline Leavitt and Peter Geye. Details ISBN1616953438 Author Thomas Maltman Short Title LITTLE WOLVES Language English ISBN-10 1616953438 ISBN-13 9781616953430 Media Book Format Paperback Birth 1971 Year 2013 Imprint Soho Press Inc Place of Publication New York Country of Publication United States UK Release Date 2013-11-26 AU Release Date 2013-11-26 NZ Release Date 2013-11-26 US Release Date 2013-11-26 Translator Daniella Gitlin Death 1847 Affiliation Professor of Psychiatry, University of Geneva Position Illustrator Qualifications PsyD Publisher Soho Press Inc Publication Date 2013-11-26 DEWEY 813.6 Audience General Pages 348 We've got this At The Nile, if you're looking for it, we've got it. With fast shipping, low prices, friendly service and well over a million items - you're bound to find what you want, at a price you'll love! TheNile_Item_ID:137579152;

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