Winner of the Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Fiction, this collection of loosely connected tales returns readers to the American Northwest so finely observed and powerfully evoked in John Keeble’s previous, celebrated works. Nocturnal America occupies a terrain at once familiar and strange, where homecoming and dislocation can coincide, and families can break apart or hone themselves on the hard edges of daily life. In these stories, Keeble populates what journalist Joel Garreau once called the “Empty Quarter” of North America with complex humanity. Life ranges vibrantly through these airy spaces, at times finding itself thrown up against the shifty terrors of political change and the antic scrim of culture.
Keeble’s stories hinge on love—its difficulty, its loss and pangs, but also its discovery of good fortune and even illumination in steadiness through travail. As his characters come and go, unexpectedly converging, vanishing, or reappearing, their stories reach beyond the ordinariness of life and the particularities of place to create something akin to community.
(20061212)
John Keeble was born in Winnipeg, Canada, and raised in Saskatchewan and California. For thirty years, he has lived with his family in rural Eastern Washington where he and his wife, Claire, a musician, now raise hay, free range chickens, and organic grass fed beef cattle. They have three grown sons and three grandchildren. His novel, Yellowfish (Harper and Row, 1980) was re-issued in a new edition with an "Introduction" by Bill Kittredge and an author's "Postscript" by the University of Washington Press. Another novel, Broken Ground (Harper and Row, 1987), was recently cited as one of the Hundred Books in Literary Oregon by the Oregon Cultural Heritage Commission, and will be reissued in a new edition in March 2010—again by the University of Washington Press. A collection of stories, Nocturnal America, the award winner in fiction in the Prairie Schooner Prize Series in Fiction, was published by University of Nebraska Press (2006). Two other novels, Crab Canon and Mine (Grossman), were published in the seventies. A book of nonfiction, Out Of The Channel: The Exxon Valdez Oil Spill In Prince William Sound, was published in 1991 (HarperCollins), and reissued in a revised and expanded Tenth Anniversary Edition in 1999 (EWU Press). Short stories, interviews, and essays on political and ecological topics have appeared in Outside, American Short Fiction, Village Voice, Story, Left Bank, Volt, Zyzzyva, Rolling Stock, and Prairie Schooner, and in the web sites, DemWorks and Camas. His work has been anthologized in Dreamers and Desperadoes: An Anthology of Contemporary Writers of the American West; The Great Land; Reflections From The Island's Edge; Listening To The Land, Conversations About Nature, Culture, And Eros; Technological Disaster At Valdez; Arctic Refuge, A Circle of Testimony, Home Ground, and in Best American Short Stories. Keeble has received a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship and a Washington State Governor's Award. In 1993, he received a Northwest Regional Emmy Award Nomination for television documentary writing for To Write And Keep Kind, a film on the life of Raymond Carver which aired on PBS in the same year. He also served as the literary consultant for a documentary on western writing, WestWord, aired on PBS in 1995. Educated at the University of Redlands, University of Iowa, and Brown University, he has taught at Grinnell College and Eastern Washington University where he founded the Master of Fine Arts Program and is now Professor Emeritus. On three occasions, most recently the fall of 2002, he held the Coal Royalty Trust Chair in Creative Writing at the University of Alabama, and also served there as Visiting Professor for an additional year. He is a board member and past board president of the Sitka, Alaska-based Island Institute.
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这本书的封面设计本身就带着一种难以言喻的吸引力,那种深沉的蓝色调和稀疏的星光,仿佛直接将你拉入了一个午夜的、未知的领域。初读之下,我立刻被作者那种近乎偏执的细节捕捉能力所震撼。他似乎不仅仅是在观察,而是在“体验”夜幕下的每一个细微的振动和声响。比如,他对城市边缘地带,那些被日光遗忘的角落里,植物如何调整其生长周期以适应极端的低光环境的描写,简直是生物学教科书级别的精准,但又被诗意的语言包裹得恰到好处。那种冷峻的科学观察与对生命力的赞美交织在一起,形成了一种独特的阅读节奏。我特别喜欢其中关于“声景”的章节,作者花了大量的篇幅去解析蝙蝠回声定位的复杂性,以及城市低频噪音如何塑造了夜行动物的行为模式。这不仅仅是关于“看不见”的世界,更是关于“听不见”的那个维度被强行曝光的过程。阅读体验是极其沉浸的,仿佛我自己的感官被放大了一百倍,我能闻到湿润泥土的气味,感受到夜风拂过皮肤的微凉。这无疑是一部需要慢读,并且值得反复咀嚼的作品,它挑战了我们对“白天中心主义”的固有认知。
评分从主题的深度上讲,这本书更像是一场关于“边界消融”的哲学探讨。夜,在这里不仅仅是时间概念,它是一个心理学上的阈限空间——介于清醒与梦境、已知与未知、社会规范与原始本能之间的地带。作者不断地在追问:当光线消失后,我们真实的自我、社会的隐秘结构,乃至生态系统的底层逻辑,会以何种面貌显现?他通过对各种夜间现象的细致剖析,暗示着白天所构建的秩序,在夜色下是多么的脆弱和依赖于光照的馈赠。这种探讨的层次是极其丰富的,它不仅触及了生态学的变化,更深入到了人类意识的深层结构。读完此书,我感觉自己对“夜晚”的理解被彻底重构了。它不再是休息的代名词,而是一个充满未开发信息和潜在力量的领域。这本书迫使你重新评估你在二十四小时周期中所占据的位置,以及你对世界的认知基础是否只是建立在一个不稳定的、光明的错觉之上。这是一次对感知和认知的彻底颠覆。
评分这本书的语言风格变化多端,令人目不暇接。有些段落读起来,你会以为自己正在阅读一本十七世纪的旅行日记,那种古老的、充满韵律感的长句,描绘着被月光拉长的影子,充满了洛可可式的华丽感。然而,下一页,语言风格会骤然转向,变成极简主义的、充满技术术语的报告体,精准地列举着某种特定频率的电磁波对特定昆虫的影响。这种风格上的巨大反差,本身就构成了阅读体验的一部分。作者仿佛在不断地更换他的“面具”,时而是浪漫的诗人,时而是严谨的科学家,时而又像是一个在街头巷尾收集八卦的民间说书人。这种多变的语调,成功地避免了单一视角带来的审美疲劳。它要求读者时刻保持警惕,因为你永远不知道下一句话会以何种声调出现。这种对语言工具箱的全面展示,无疑是这本书最值得称道的技术成就之一,它证明了主题的广阔性需要匹配同样广阔的表达工具。
评分如果让我用一个词来概括这本书带给我的核心感受,那一定是“疏离”。作者的笔触是冰冷的,他的观察者姿态几乎达到了临床的精确度。他描述了某些特定群体在夜间活动时所展现出的社会性隔离——那些夜班工作者、那些在城市边缘游荡的人,以及那些完全避开公共视野的生物。他很少使用煽情的词汇来描述他们的困境或挣扎,而是用一种近乎冷漠的、客观的镜头去记录,这种克制反而比直接的情感宣泄更有力量。你读到的是事实,是数据,是冰冷的现实投影,但正是这种缺乏温度的叙述,让读者得以跳出自身的情感框架,进行更深层次的反思。我仿佛成了一个隐藏在暗处的幽灵,观察着这个“另一半”世界的不懈运转。这种疏离感并非负面的,它提供了一种独特的清醒视角,让人审视自己白天生活中那些被忽视的、被忽略的社会结构和生态关系。这本书像一面棱镜,折射出光鲜亮丽的日常表象下,那些隐秘而庞大的运作体系。
评分这本书的叙事结构,坦白说,初看时有些令人费解,它跳跃得厉害,像是无数张散落的、没有顺序的底片突然被强光照射。它不像传统意义上的“非虚构”那样遵循线性的时间逻辑,反而更像是一部关于“意识流动”的文学作品。作者似乎并不关心讲一个完整的故事,他的目标是将读者置于一种持续的、不确定的“寻找”状态之中。我读到一半时,差点因为这种叙事上的碎片化而感到挫败,但随后的领悟让我不得不对作者的构思拍案叫绝。这种破碎感,恰恰是模拟了夜间环境本身的不确定性与偶然性。你永远不知道下一刻会遇到什么,光线、声音、乃至危险,都可能是随机的。他巧妙地将人类学、天文学以及个人回忆录的片段进行无缝对接,让你在阅读时,必须自己去构建那些缺失的连接点。这要求读者投入极大的心智能量,但一旦你接受了这种不确定性,阅读的乐趣就来源于不断地“解码”作者设置的谜题。这是一种高级的智力游戏,它拒绝被轻易消化,从而在你的脑海中留下深刻的、难以磨灭的印记。
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