The City Beneath the Snow: Stories — Marjorie Kowalski Cole

Bellwether Prize-winner Cole pays homage to the strength and beauty of the people and landscape of her adopted home, Alaska.” -- Publishers Weekly (starred review)

The final collection of stories by award-winning writer Marjorie Kowalski Cole, The City Beneath the Snow is a portrait of contemporary Alaskans, their interactions, and their foibles. These stories reveal the moral decisions that lurk at unexpected corners in daily life as the characters confront a world at once magical and ordinary, joy-filled and tragic. Together, they give the reader an intimate portrait of a people and place more often portrayed through wilderness specials and reality adventure shows.

“Marjorie Kowalski 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 . . . These are inner lives, revealed with care and with skill, the true material of good literature.” -- Peggy Shumaker, Alaska State Writer Laureate
“These are indeed short stories, but each has its own unquestionable beauty . . . 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.” -- Foreword Reviews