Katharine Haake's"The Height and Depth of Everything"is a book of journeys in which displaced women make unsettling forays into the new West. There, some violent expression of nature disrupts their lives, forcing them to readjust their vision of the world. Like the places they live Washington state in the aftermath of the eruption of Mount St. Helens; the rubble-strewn epicenter of Southern California after a recent earthquake; the flooded streets of a desert town in Utah the characters in this collection are all "picking up the pieces" of lives shaken by both natural and spiritual disaster....

For several generations, Katharine Haake's family has been intimately linked with the landscape and history of far-northern California. In That Water, Those Rocks, she offers a brilliant novel that interlaces autobiographical writing, natural history, and reflections on the craft of writing itself. Shasta Dam, the graceful, curved centerpiece of California's Central Valley Project, lies at the heart of this multi-layered work. The dam's construction, and the impact of its presence, becomes the obsession and occupation for all of Haake's characters. Containing and controlling the water of...

Fiction. These stories, powerful eco-fables of down-home Americana, take place during the relentless rollover from one millennium to the next in a world remarkably like our own--and not. In one, for example, a girl exquisitely tuned to the sorrows of history ends up in a city blasted by light where she gets the chance to try dreaming things over. In another, a boy born lacking the ability to distinguish phonetic difference grows up to be a famed musician. There's a dapper, square-headed astronomer who discovers the origin of stars, and a tiny-footed climber who scales the tallest mountains in...

Fiction. Lyrical, provocative, and deeply haunting, THE TIME OF QUARANTINE, takes us into a near-distant future of post-human environmental collapse to chronicle the tale of a boy raised alone in the woods by computers at the end of the world or is it? As the sole surviving member of an ill-fated Intentional Community designed to escape world's end plagues and convinced he is alone on earth, the boy now a man is determined to carry out the final wishes of his father and fulfill his stoic duties of merely being human. But when he discovers, as if by accident, that everything he's always...