Event
North Sun
Join us on Friday, March 14, 6:30 pm for a conversation with author Ethan Rutherford to celebrate the launch of his new book, North Sun, or the Voyage of the Whaleship Esther.
“NORTH SUN is a deeply wonderful, strange and magnificent book. I swam through its unique pages with glee and horror and joy and came up for air gasping at what a deeply brilliant writer Ethan Rutherford is. The novel is completely exhilarating.”- Edward Carey, author of Little, The Swallowed Man, and Edith Holler: A Novel
“This book is bonkers and I loved every rollicking, awkward, solemn, gorgeously written, isolated, melancholic, beautiful moment I spent with Arnold Lovejoy, his thoughts, his crew, the unending ice, and the sea, the empty-not-so-empty sea. Ethan Rutherford’s NORTH SUN is a damn harrowing sorrowful delight.”—Manuel Gonzales, author of The Miniature Wife and The Regional Office is Under Attack!
“Haunting, hallucinatory, and unrelentingly gorgeous, NORTH SUN feels as real as a history and as strange as a myth. The depths of Rutherford’s imagination left me enraptured and unsettled. This is the kind of book that will keep talking to you long after you’ve finished reading.” – Jennifer duBois, author of The Last Language
“I don’t know how, but Ethan Rutherford did it: He wrote Moby Dick for our times.”- Emily Barton, author of Brookland and The Book of Esther
“The evocative first novel from Rutherford (after the story collection Farthest South) depicts the end of the whaling era in the late 1870s. Worn-out captain Arnold Lovejoy is tasked by whaling baron Mr. Ashley with retrieving his son-in-law, Benjamin Leander, who’s gone native on the Alaskan coast after his ship was crushed by the ice, leaving his wife Sarah and their frail child behind. Accompanying Captain Lovejoy aboard the whaleship Esther are two others with tasks of their own: mysterious passenger Edmund Thule and a presence unseen by most, a seabird-man spirit named Old Sorrel who
begins to haunt the crew halfway through the voyage.
As Lovejoy sails the Esther to the Chukchi Sea north of Alaska in search of Leander, his crew hunts whales for oil and sport. Chronicling in brisk and poetic prose their numerous travails, needless deaths, and hidden perversions, Rutherford plumbs the depths men will sink to in extracting what they desire from nature and their fellow man. This harsh and stark ballad of a bygone time will move readers.” – Publishers Weekly
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PROGRAM:
6:00 – Doors Open
6:30 – 6:45 – Poet Clare Rossini will open the program
6:45 – 7:15 – Ethan will show a short presentation and read an excerpt from North Sun
7:15 – 8:00 PM – Book signing
Music courtesy of Sinan Bakir
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This event is FREE to the public, but will require advance registration.
Books will be sold onsite by River Bend Bookshop, on the day of the event. Concessions will be open and available if guests want to purchase beverages, popcorn, and snacks.
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(Photo of Ethan Rutherford by Lou Russo)
Ethan Rutherford is the author of two story collections—Farthest South and The Peripatetic Coffin and Other Stories—and for these works has been named a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction, a finalist for the John Leonard Prize and CLMP’s Firecracker Award, received honorable mention for the PEN/Hemingway Award, was a
Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers selection, and was the winner of a Minnesota Book Award.
North Sun, or the Voyage of the Whaleship Esther is his first novel.
