Overview

The Souls of Others is a powerful essay collection by American Book Award winner Shann Ray. Ray depicts the American west as both magnificent and destitute. The mountains are alive. The people are gritty, destitute, and resilient. Nature offers its bounty but never gives it with ease. Ray, having spent part of his childhood on the Northern Cheyenne reservation, expertly paints a place of family, sorrow, and a connection to Mother Nature that so many Americans have lost.

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9781956692006

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Reviews

Shann Ray's prose brings to mind Cormac McCarthy and Annie Proulx but is, thankfully, entirely his own. His work is lyrical, prophetic, brutal yet ultimately hopeful. -Dave Eggers, author of What is the What Shann Ray hones the cutting edge between desire and need, despair and beauty. I am reminded once again of what it means to encounter genuine grace. -Clair Davis, author of Labors of the Heart Ray writes with an unsettling power. -Benjamin Percy, for Esquire In the work of Shann Ray I find the beauty I knew and lost and know now again. I find, too, the hunger and loss and piercing darkness, that which we must admit before we move on. I find a soul-igniting belief in history, honesty, wilderness, and forgiveness. I wish as a boy in Montana I could have turned to Ray as one of my teachers, as I do now. I wish I would have been able, all those years ago, to hold these essays--like maps, like wisdom songs--in hand. -Joe Wilkins, from the foreword, author of When We Were Birds Shann Ray's work is both grounded and spiritual. He has an eye for minute detail, and while he's describing an act of love or violence or just panning through a scene to render river and mountain range, he's also trying to understand how we respond to the often generational brutality of existence without forgetting its beauty. -Luke Baumgarten, Terrain, & Treatment/Creative

"Shann Ray's prose brings to mind Cormac McCarthy and Annie Proulx but is, thankfully, entirely his own. His work is lyrical, prophetic, brutal yet ultimately hopeful. -Dave Eggers, author of What is the What Shann Ray hones the cutting edge between desire and need, despair and beauty. I am reminded once again of what it means to encounter genuine grace."" -Clair Davis, author of Labors of the Heart Ray writes with an unsettling power. -Benjamin Percy, for Esquire In the work of Shann Ray I find the beauty I knew and lost and know now again. I find, too, the hunger and loss and piercing darkness, that which we must admit before we move on. I find a soul-igniting belief in history, honesty, wilderness, and forgiveness. I wish as a boy in Montana I could have turned to Ray as one of my teachers, as I do now. I wish I would have been able, all those years ago, to hold these essays--like maps, like wisdom songs--in hand. -Joe Wilkins, from the foreword, author of When We Were Birds Shann Ray's work is both grounded and spiritual. He has an eye for minute detail, and while he's describing an act of love or violence or just panning through a scene to render river and mountain range, he's also trying to understand how we respond to the often generational brutality of existence without forgetting its beauty. -Luke Baumgarten, Terrain, & Treatment/Creative"

Author Information

Poet, short story writer, and novelist Shann Ray grew up in Montana and Alaska and spent part of his childhood on the Northern Cheyenne reservation. His work has been featured in Poetry, Esquire, McSweeney's, Prairie Schooner, Big Sky Journal, Narrative, and Salon. A National Endowment for the Arts Fellow and winner of the American Book Award and the High Plains Book Award, he is the author of American Masculine, American Copper, Atomic Theory 432, Balefire, Sweetclover, and Forgiveness and Power in the Age of Atrocity. A clinical psychologist specializing in the psychology of men, he teaches leadership and forgiveness studies at Gonzaga University. Because of his wife and three daughters, he believes in love.

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