PRAISE FOR 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. How I shall miss its company, how I do long for Old Sorrel. In short, I consider this completely original tale of man and nature and ocean an absolute triumph.”—Edward Carey, author of Little, The Swallowed Man, and Edith Holler: A Novel

“Following a couple of well-received story collections, Rutherford makes an audacious leap as a novelist. Cadences that recall Melville or Coleridge are suffused with an environmentalist urgency and existential dread. The setup is relatively straightforward. In 1878 Massachusetts, during the waning days of the whaling industry, Arnold Lovejoy arrives in New Bedford with a letter for the Ashleys, the leading family of whaling. “As businesspeople they were ruthless,” Rutherford writes. “As whalers, they’d had no equal.” The letter says that one of their ships had been crushed by ice, and that its captain has chosen not to return. It turns out that the captain is the Ashleys' son-in-law, and that his wife, whom Lovejoy meets at the house, is the most beautiful woman he has ever seen. He falls instantly in love. The Ashleys commission Lovejoy, a seafaring captain himself, to voyage in search of the lost ship and captain. Having long felt more at home at sea than on land, he complies. . . Amid bad weather and considerable bloodshed, the voyage proceeds into the heart of oceanic darkness, where the true nature of the mission unfolds. A classically styled novel that sounds a very contemporary alarm.” — Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

“North Sun’s ultimate tragedy, and its genius, however, derives from its knowledge that just as quickly as this balance [between human & nature] arose, it was brought crashing down by the inexorable tide of progress. With the death of whaling came the fall of one of the last bastions of myth in our society; the novel merely allows us a posthumous glimpse into its final days.” — The Baffler

“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

“Told through the doomed expedition of a fictional whaling ship in the 1870s, North Sun: Or, The Voyage of the Whaleship Esther is about those who believe the world is theirs for the taking and those considered disposable enough to be sent to do the dirty work. . . At various times horrifying, poetic, and heart-wrenching, it’s told with spare and often brutal turns of phrase in the form of short passages that bring to mind old sea captains’ logs. The details of the days, weeks, and months spent at sea by the crew of the Esther reflect on the unfeeling and unsympathetic forces of the natural world: How the ship is at the mercy of the wind; how the sky and sea can turn menacing in a heartbeat, or torture with sameness for unending days of blistering heat; how storms can create mountainous waves that make the ship a gut-roiling prison no one can escape. . . With its strong foundation in the tradition of dramatic sea quests, this book is highly recommended for readers of adventure and survival fiction. Those interested in the American whaling industry of the late 1800s or its technologies and techniques will appreciate the detailed descriptions of the Esthers’s special design and specialized equipment and weapons. At the same time, the constant tension, exploration of human morality, insight into the psychology of its characters, and at times outright gore means it will also be at home on the shelves of thriller enthusiasts.” — Independent Book Review (starred Review)

“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

Praise for Farthest South: Stories

"We read these stories to be reassured as much as unsettled. In "Fable," a woman prepares to tell a story about shape-shifting foxes, the human baby they adopt and the wolf that hunts them. "Is it a love story at all?" a listener asks. "Will we be scared?" Yes. And yes.” Star Tribune

“A spooky, sweet, wondrous short story collection. Rutherford’s stories possess undeniable darkness, and his collection maintains suspense throughout. But the thread that connects the stories is not scary, bleak, or supernatural—it’s the presence and importance of family. . . an imaginative, transformative, and delightful short story collection.” Foreword Reviews (starred review)

“These stories take us on sea voyages, they create myths and monsters, then dive straight into the intimacies, hopes, fears, and dreams of children and their parents. This is a book about the world, for the world.” BOMB

“These fresh and provocative yarns are spun with craft of a high order.” Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“The elements of plot in these stories are often strange and scary—two foxes kidnap a human child to raise as their own, a mother succumbs to spiritual illness, a baby’s illness is nightmarishly investigated at an impersonal hospital—and the contexts throughout are young families, young marriages, young children, and the perception of overwhelming threat facing them all. The stories they weave, which incorporate elements of memories, dreams, fears, and fables, don’t necessarily provide comfort or even much in the way of resolution. They don’t have a lesson except that people tell stories to seek order amid chaos, hope amid impending doom, a reason to keep going. . . [These are] stories that test the boundaries of the fictional imagination.” Kirkus (starred review)

"Farthest South makes me want to renew my vows to the short story form. Ethan Rutherford’s stories are dreamy and crisp. They lull and then startle. Best of all, they don't go anywhere I expect them to. I am obsessed." / Diane Cook, author of The New Wilderness and Man V. Nature

“In these disquieting stories, the surface of seemingly placid, ordinary American life gives way to startling eruptions of the strange, the marvelous, and the dreadful.  Each story is an uncanny revelation, as if Nathaniel Hawthorne had decided to take up residence among us.  “What did I miss?” numerous characters ask in the collection, and while the characters often do not know, Ethan Rutherford does.  A brilliant and literally wonderful collection.” / Rattawut Lapcharoensap, author of Sightseeing

“The nine gorgeous and disorienting tales in Farthest South explore the terrors of love and attachment. These are sublime, disquieting, and consequential stories for our moment.” / Amity Gaige, author of Sea Wife 

“Ethan Rutherford is one of our great artists of catastrophe. Drawing on landscapes both mythic—the fairytale, the ghost story—and domestic, this collection illuminates terrors that feel at once prescient and eternal. Farthest South is a masterpiece.” / Laura van den Berg, author of I Hold A Wolf by the Ears and The Third Hotel

"Ethan Rutherford’s stories combine nail-biting tension with crystalline description, humor, and endings that are as marvelously strange as they are rewarding. Toggling between the eerie and the radiantly familiar, Farthest South is unsettling in all the best ways.  This is a beautifully spellbinding book." / Julie Schumacher, author of Dear Committee Members and The Shakespeare Requirement

“Again and again you can feel the stories in Farthest South striking out after fascination and surprising themselves with wisdom. Ethan Rutherford pairs a classic style with a haunted vision. Narratives that are all grace and ease at the beginning gradually become soaked in dread and hallucination. Reading them is by equal measures comforting and jolting, like sinking into a warm bath and feeling the brush of something living against your body.” / Kevin Brockmeier, author of The Ghost Variations and A Few Seconds of Radiant Filmstrip

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Praise for Peripatetic Coffin and Other Stories

“Rutherford’s wildly inventive collection is nothing short of a revelation. From polar expeditions to family turmoil, no experience is beyond this very fine writer’s ambitious grasp. He gives us the world with each story, with the world’s full measure of heartbreak and hilarity.” / Ben Fountain, National Book Critics Circle award-winning author of Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk

“A confident and winning collection, every story in The Peripatetic Coffin feels necessary and true. Ethan Rutherford gets it.” / Patrick DeWitt, author of The Sisters Brothers

“Ethan Rutherford’s stories are funny and wrenching and feature hapless fatalists who nonetheless never stop striving, whose motto might be It’s Not Too Late to Take Responsibility for What We’re Doing, even as they continue to squander such opportunities. And yet they never let us forget that there’s always the possibility that they will learn-even if it’s the hard way-to see beyond themselves.” / Jim Shepard, author of National Book Award finalist Like You’d Understand Anyway and The Book of Aron

“Ethan Rutherford’s stories are absolutely perfect. . . I rarely feel this close to heartbreak, this strengthened by a writer clearly doing something special.” / Kevin Wilson, author of The Family Fang

“Moving seamlessly from one world to another, from oceans to a snow-covered meadow to the rooms of childhood, each story is a vessel of longing and possibility . . . . this book is a revelatory feat of the imagination, and The Peripatetic Coffin is an incomparable, vital debut.” / Paul Yoon, author of Run Me To Earth and Snow Hunters

“This is a flat-out beautiful book of stories.” / Charles Baxter, author of National Book Award finalist The Feast of Love

“Ethan Rutherford can slay you with humor and buoy you within the midst of tragedy. His range is amazing. Every story is 100% Grade-A storytelling.” Alice Sebold / author of The Lovely Bones