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list price: $24.95
edition:Hardcover
category: Travel
published: Sep 2008
ISBN:9781553654285
publisher: Douglas & McIntyre

Early in the Season

A British Columbia Journal

by Edward Hoagland, introduction by Stephen Hume

tagged: western provinces, essays, personal memoirs
Description

A great essayist's portrait of British Columbia in the 1960s, following Notes from the Century Before.

 

In 1968 Edward Hoagland embarked on his second trip to British Columbia. The following year he published the journal from his first trip as Notes from the Century Before, a classic that is still in print today. Early in the Season is the never-before-published account of the second journey, a trip that formed the basis for his fourth novel, Seven Rivers West, and was recently excerpted in the Houghton Mifflin Best American Travel Writing anthology.

 

An introduction by award-winning writer Stephen Hume and a new epilogue by Hoagland himself reveal why, forty years later, this historically rich window on the people and places that shaped British Columbia is still relevant today.

About the Authors
Edward Hoagland is one of the best contemporary American essayists, known for his nature and travel writing. His essays and short stories have appeared in the New Yorker, the Atlantic, Harper's and the New York Times Book Review. The author of twenty books and the general editor for the Penguin Nature Library, he won the Houghton Mifflin Literary Fellowship for the novel Cat Man and was elected to the American Academy of Institute of Arts and Letters. He lives in Martha's Vineyard and Bartown, Vermont.

Stephen Hume is a columnist and senior writer at the Vancouver Sun. He has written extensively about British Columbia, winning a BC Book Award for Bush Telegraph and another for A Stain Upon the Sea. Hume lives near Victoria, British Columbia.
Editorial Reviews

"The story of a place is written not only by those who live there, but also by outsiders savvy enough to let us to see ourselves with new eyes. British Columbia could not ask for a better witness than Edward Hoagland: blunt, spontaneous, dreamy, worldly, randy, adoring, unflinching. And here his voice is as clear as could be; Early in the Season is a true journal, hot from the mind and onto the page. It will send you out into the unloved country, the wilderness that still shapes us, if only to prove him right or wrong."

— J.B. MacKinnon

"Here are mountain men, trappers, truck drivers, yarn-spinners and grizzly attach survivors; a gallery of aromatic wilderness humanity, sketched with such deft, unsentimental directness as to be prose equivalents of black-and-white Polaroids...Early in the Season is an extraordinarily find little book, required reading for anyone who wonders what writing can do or whether it's possible to visit the same place twice."

— Toronto Star

"Hoagland writes with a keen eye for flora and fauna, and an even keener ear for rustic hyperbole: one old sourdough recounts how pioneering winters were so cold 'the smoke from the chimney had frozen into a pillar towering in the air, and they'd chopped that down and sawed it up and built a house out of the blocks, a real "smokehouse".' Nobody tells stories like that anymore...We're lucky, then, that those myths live on in this book."

— Georgia Straight

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