The City Beneath the Snow

“Cole’s characters live, work, and struggle in interior Alaska, and she depicts life here with a keen eye and with compassion. We see the daughter of a Fairbanks junkyard owner, struggling with her isolation. We meet a bartender at Circle Hot Springs who’s also a certified nurse’s assistant at Fairbanks Memorial Hospital. A newcomer to Fairbanks fall in love with the aurora. We watch a marriage strained nearly to breaking after a young daughter drowns in the slough. We seen an alcohol abuse counselor and the pilot that flies her around the bush trying to find their way after a brief sexual encounter. These are the inner lives, revealed with care and with skill, the true material of good literature.”

“In her posthumous book of short stories, Bellwether Prize-winner Cole (A Spell on the Water) pays homage to the strength and beauty of the people and landscape of her adopted home, Alaska—an entity formidable enough to seem a character in its own right, as it drives, confounds, and inspires its inhabitants.”

“With her Bellwether Prize-winning novel Correcting the Landscape . . . Marjorie Kowalski Cole put Fairbanks, Alaska, on the literary map. Her posthumously published story collection The City Beneath the Snow again brings to life the people of that outpost in the boreal forest, besieged by winter for six months out of the year.”

"Cole allows us to partake in the beauty and the harshness of the Alaskan landscape, but they are background to the characters’ thoughts about what has happened, or what is happening, in their lives. Each story in The City Beneath the Snow begs re-reading, whether to absorb the poetic prose once more, or to attempt to resolve an ending that left a question mark. The characters are real, their situations elicit compassion, and Cole’s writing deserves to be savored."