Based on an Athabascan legend passed along from mother to daughter for many generations on the upper Yukon River in Alaska, this is the tragic and shocking story--with a surprise ending--of two elderly women abandoned by a migrating tribe that faces starvation brought on by unusually harsh Arctic weather and a shortage of fish and game. The story of survival is told with suspense by Velma Wallis, whose subject matter challenges the taboos of her past. Yet, her themes are modern--empowerment of women, the graying of America, Native American ways.

Twenty years after its first publication, Two Old Women continues to be a publishing phenomenon, despite scant national publicity. This word-of-mouth book has been translated into seventeen languages, selling more than 1.5 million copies. This twentieth anniversary edition includes a new introduction by the author, new afterword by the editor, and a discussion guide for book-group readers.

2020 was a year of change. Caught between occupations and a global pandemic, 24-year-old Joe Jackson decided to write an essay for every fly-fishing trip he took. And just like the fishing itself, these essays drift from the metaphysical to the wholly matter-of-fact.

I was born in Harbin, Manchuria, (later China), in 1938. At the outbreak of the Second World War my mother, sister and I, along with other non-combatants of the Allied countries, were taken by the Japanese to an internment camp in Tokyo where we would remain four year--to the end of the war. My mother's recollection is that I was a sickly child. By the time I arrived in Japan, according to her, I had survived diphtheria, whooping cough, yellow fever, smallpox and tuberculosis. Such afflictions, to my mother's astonishment, did not keep me from growing to my adult height of 6'6 and muscular weight of 220 pounds. Nor did they keep me from being strong enough and skillful enough to become a professional basketball player and play 10 years for the National Basketball Association, as the first ethnic Russian and immigrant to do so, and the first to be named to an All-Star team.

On a foggy afternoon in September of 1982 the Investor, a salmon fishing vessel, was engulfed in flames near the tiny village of Craig, Alaska. All efforts to stop the blaze were repulsed by the heat and fury of fire--until the blaze until it had run its course. Eight people, including a pregnant woman and two small children, were missing.

On the charred wreck of the Investor, troopers hoped to find evidence that the fire was accidental, and that the crew and family were away from the scene. Instead, they found bullet-ridden bodies. The investigation of the case and arrest of a former crewmember of the Investor became a nationwide sensation, with headlines appearing in the New York Times and People Magazine. John Kenneth Peel, a Bellingham fisherman was the center of the investigation and eventual trials for murder and arson. Convoluted motivations, family secrets, a lawyer bent on protecting his client, family members of the victims seeking answers swirl into a story only one person can know--and he isn't telling.

Leland Hale, author of Butcher, Baker: The True Account of an Alaskan Serial Killer, meticulously researched the events of the Investor tragedy, and when alibis don't line up and witnesses doubt their own memory, Hale's narrative pulls the unraveling story together into a book that will keep your attention long after you turn the final page.

Velma Wallis shares the love, loss, and struggle that mark her

coming of age in a two-room cabin at Fort Yukon, Alaska, where

she is born in 1960, the sixth of thirteen children. Family life is

defined by the business of survival: Haul water from the Yukon.

Kill a moose. Chop firewood. Feed the sled dogs staked around

the cabin. Run the trap line. Catch salmon. It is a time of innocence

and laughter, too, as the children escape into a world of

play under the midnight sun.

The once-migratory family has settled at the confluence of two

she is born in 1960, the sixth of thirteen children. Family life is

defined by the business of survival: Haul water from the Yukon.

Kill a moose. Chop firewood. Feed the sled dogs staked around

the cabin. Run the trap line. Catch salmon. It is a time of innocence

and laughter, too, as the children escape into a world of

play under the midnight sun.

Junetta Beale is living in paradise. As owner of the Shipshape Bookshop in Southeast Alaska, she sells books in town, operates a lending library for the locals, and serves the villages in her floating bookmobile. She loves her peaceful coastal life.

That peace is shattered when she returns from her latest voyage through the Inside Passage. Someone has trashed her bookshop, stolen the town's historic treasure map from the wall, and left a dead body in her back room. Somehow, a charming newcomer's tale of his family history is bound up with the present mystery. When the troopers arrest Uncle Vance for the crime, Junetta knows the cantankerous old sourdough is no murderer. She must dig up the truth to prove her uncle's innocence before a killer takes her out of circulation.

In the early twentieth century a bear frightens a team of horses into plunging to their deaths from off a hill near a proposed railroad route through wilderness Alaska. In 1974 young Californians Thomas Findlay and Emily Wells dig post holes for a cabin on that very hill and unearth a human bone. The discovery shatters their struggle for stability and their attempt to start their lives over, propelling the couple toward their own tragedy as their story intertwines with one that unfolded in 1927, where the hill they hope to build on was the site of love, loss, and deadly violence.

Federal Marshal Frank Leishke is called to the scene of the vicious murder of a prostitute in Douglas, Alaska, in 1916. The site of the largest gold mine in the world, Douglas was also home to numerous bars, prostitutes and itinerant workers. Leishke is aided in his work by friends of the murdered woman, including a housemaid who becomes more to him than he expects. The three work together against a lawless town, an international sex trafficking ring, and the machinations of an adroit killer.

History has long ignored many of the earliest female pioneers of the Klondike Gold Rush of North America-the prostitutes and other disreputable women who joined the mass pilgrimage to the booming gold camps at the turn of the century. Leaving behind hometowns in North America and Europe and most constraints of the post-Victorian era, the good time girls crossed both geographic and social frontiers, finding freedom, independence, hardship, heartbreak, and sometimes astonishing wealth.

These women possessed the courage and perseverance to brave a dangerous journey into a harsh wilderness where men sometimes outnumbered them more than ten to one. Many later became successful entrepreneurs, wealthy property owners, or the wives of prominent citizens. Their influence changed life in America's Far North forever.

HAUNTED ALASKA is a collection of ghost stories that will make the hair rise on the back of your neck. They tell of miners terrorized by ghosts, of reindeer herders who run in fear as one of their own departed comes back in spirit form, and of human voices heard in an empty woods, complete with the smell of a campfire that isn't there

When the ice breaks, one mystery is solved and another arises. Six months after Norm Lewis disappeared while flying out Anchorage, his fractured Cessna is discovered half submerged in the frigid waters of an isolated lake miles from his intended destination. The only body in the pale is strapped in the passenger seat an unidentified woman.

James J. Hill, the Empire Builder, (1838-1916) was a Canadian-American railroad executive with the Great Northern Railway, responsible for building railways across the northern US. Part visionary, part robber baron, part buccaneer, Stewart Holbrook brings his story to life, in brief, as well as the lives of the other movers and shakers in the railway scene of the times.

Iditarod musher Jessie Arnold is being stalked and terrorized by an anonymous

enemy. First, one of her sled dogs is badly injured in a steel trap and an ominous

note leaves no doubt that the trap was set with malicious intent. Threatening

phone calls and unsigned messages follow-pressing Alaska State Trooper

Alex Jensen to urge Jessie to go into hiding while he tries to track down the

source of the threats. Finally, a near fatal car crash convinces Jessie to let Alex

fly her to an isolated island more than two hundred miles away.

Three days before the season opening, Native Alaskan commercial salmon fisherman, Johnny Ingman leaves his hometown of Sweetwater bound for the fishing grounds and disappears.

Johnny's disappearance comes at a time of deep frustration in Johnny's tiny home village. Changing pressures, values, and demands from the outside world are increasingly disrupting insular, secretive, and self-reliant Alaskan communities like Sweetwater, undermining their traditional cultures, and threatening the vulnerable salmon troll fishery that is their economic base.