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""A grief-stricken, heart-hopeful, soul song to the American Desert."" --PAM HOUSTON, author of Deep Creek As Ed Abbey's Desert Solitaire: A Season in the Wilderness turns fifty, its iconic author, who has inspired generations of rebel-rousing advocacy on behalf of the American West, is due for a tribute as well as a talking to. In Desert Cabal: A New Season in the Wilderness, Amy Irvine admires the man who influenced her life and work while challenging all that is dated--offensive, even--between the covers of Abbey's environmental classic. Irvine names and questions the ""lone male"" narrative--white and privileged as it is--that still has its boots planted firmly at the center of today's wilderness movement, even as she celebrates the lens through which Abbey taught so many to love the wild remains of the nation. From Abbey's quiet notion of solitude to Irvine's roaring cabal, the desert just got hotter, and its defenders more nuanced and numerous. AMY IRVINE is a sixth-generation Utahn and longtime public lands activist. Her work has been published in Orion, Pacific Standard, High Desert Journal, Climbing, Triquarterly, and other publications. Her memoir, Trespass: Living at the Edge of the Promised Land, received the Orion Book Award, the Ellen Meloy Desert Writers Award, and Colorado Book Award. Her essay ""Spectral Light,"" which appeared in Orion and The Best American Science and Nature Writing, was a finalist for the Pen Award in Journalism, and her recent essay, ""Conflagrations: Motherhood, Madness and a Planet on Fire"" appeared among the 2017 Best American Essays' list of Notables. Irvine teaches in the Mountainview Low-Residency MFA Program of Southern New Hampshire University--in the White Mountains of New England. She lives and writes off the grid in southwest Colorado, just spitting distance from her Utah homeland.

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9781937226978

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Amy Irvine is Ed Abbey's underworld, her roots reaching into the dark, hidden water. In a powerful, dreamlike series of essays, she lays Desert Solitaire bare, looking back at the man who wrote the book and the desert left behind. This stream of consciousness, this conversation, this full-frontal rant is an alternate version of Abbey's country. It is another voice in the wilderness. --CRAIG CHILDS, author of Atlas of a Lost World and Apocalyptic Planet Amy Irvine brings Desert Solitaire into a generational critique of where we find ourselves today. Conversation will be the most important thing to emerge from her lively tete-a-tete. --TERRY TEMPEST WILLIAMS, author of Hour of Land: A Personal Topography of America's National Parks and Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place Amy Irvine lays bare the mostly bleached bones of Desert Solitaire fifty years hence. Amy shows an uncanny ability to scrape the joints clean and dig deep into the marrow to find truth. Desert Cabal will make you squirm, yet reminds us that Edward Abbey was only human, that our human psyche continues to evolve as does our understanding of life and nature. --ANDY NETTELL, proprietor Back of Beyond Books, Moab, Utah

Amy Irvine is Ed Abbey's underworld, her roots reaching into the dark, hidden water. In a powerful, dreamlike series of essays, she lays Desert Solitaire bare, looking back at the man who wrote the book and the desert left behind. This stream of consciousness, this conversation, this broadside is an alternate version of Abbey's country. It is another voice in the wilderness. --CRAIG CHILDS, author of Atlas of a Lost World and Apocalyptic Planet Amy Irvine lays bare the mostly bleached bones of Desert Solitaire fifty years hence. Amy shows an uncanny ability to scrape the joints clean and dig deep into the marrow to find truth. Desert Cabal will make you squirm, yet reminds us that Edward Abbey was only human, that our human psyche continues to evolve as does our understanding of life and nature. --ANDY NETTELL, proprietor Back of Beyond Books, Moab, Utah Desert Cabal is a grief-stricken, heart-hopeful, soul song to the American Desert, a wail, a keening, a rant, a scolding, a tumult, a prayer, an aria, and a call to action. Amy Irvine implores us to trade in our solitude for solidarity, to recognize ourselves in each other and in the places we love, so that we might come together to save them. In this time of all out war being waged on America's Public Lands, I'm glad she's on my side. --PAM HOUSTON, author of Contents May Have Shifted If you've ever talked back to the canonical tomes of the environmental movement, this is a book for you. Here are the women, the people, the children, and the intimate dangers those old books so frequently erased. Here is a new and necessary ethic that might help us more openly love the land and the many living beings who share it. I found myself nodding--Yes! Yes! Thank you!--on nearly every page of Desert Cabal. --CAMILLE T. DUNGY, author of Guidebook to Relative Strangers: Journeys into Race, Motherhood and History and editor of Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry

Author Information

AMY IRVINE is a sixth-generation Utahn and longtime public lands activist. Her work has been published in Orion, Pacific Standard, High Desert Journal, Climbing, Triquarterly, and other publications. Her memoir, Trespass: Living at the Edge of the Promised Land, received the Orion Book Award, the Ellen Meloy Desert Writers Award, and Colorado Book Award. Her essay ""Spectral Light,"" which appeared in Orion and The Best American Science and Nature Writing, was a finalist for the Pen Award in Journalism, and her recent essay, ""Conflagrations: Motherhood, Madness and a Planet on Fire"" appeared among the 2017 Best American Essays' list of Notables. Irvine teaches in the Mountainview Low-Residency MFA Program of Southern New Hampshire University--in the White Mountains of New England. She lives and writes off the grid in southwest Colorado, just spitting distance from her Utah homeland.

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