Winter Count [Paperback]

Barry Lopez (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: November 2, 1999

"Perfectly crafted. . . . [These] stories expand of their own accord, lingering in the mind the way intense light lingers in the retina."  --Los Angeles Times

"Animals and landscapes have not had this weight, this precision, in American fiction since Hemingway's young heroes were fishing the streams of upper Michigan and Spain." --San Francisco Chronicle


A flock of great blue herons descending through a snowstorm to the streets of New York. . . . A river in Nebraska disappearing mysteriously. . . . A ghostly herd of buffalo that sings a song of death. . . . A mystic who raises constellations of stones from the desert floor. . . . All these are to be found in Winter Count, the exquisite and rapturous collection by the National Book Award-winning author of Arctic Dreams.

In these resonant and unpredictable stories Barry Lopez proves that he is one of the most important and original writers at work in America today. With breathtaking skill and a few deft strokes he produces painfully beautiful scenes. Combining the real with the wondrous, he offers us a pure vision of people alive to the immediacy and spiritual truth of nature.

"Powerful. . . . [Lopez] can steal your breath away." --Minneapolis Tribune

"Richly allusive, moving, compassionate, these stories celebrate the web of nature that holds the world together."
--The Philadelphia Inquirer

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

If science seeks to demystify life, literature can restore a needed measure of wonder to it. Or, as one of the characters in Barry Lopez's collection of short stories Winter Count puts it, "If you are careful, I think there is probably nothing that cannot be retrieved."

Much indeed is retrieved in Lopez's pages, first published in 1981: lost species, lost memories, lost emotions. In one especially Borgesian story, a university professor seeks to puzzle out the facts behind 19th-century reports of a herd of white buffalo that, singing, pointed a way into heaven. In another, a young man catches a glimpse into the workings of the stars and planets in an unlikely corner of the Arizona desert. In still another, a traveler recapitulates the pain of lost love while contemplating the graceful flight of herons.

Lopez's marvelous stories are about many things. Underlying them is a shared precision of language and vision, a precision that characterizes the author's works of nonfiction (Of Wolves and Men, Arctic Dreams). Behind Lopez's stories as well is a quiet insistence on the centrality of nature--an awareness of which, he suggests, can make the busiest city livable, and the deepest wounds of the heart bearable. --Gregory McNamee

Review

"Perfectly crafted--The stories--linger in the mind the way      intense light lingers in the retina." --Los Angeles Times

"An artist in language -- a first-rate American writer. Lopez goes straight to the heart of the peculiar sensations, both physical and mental, known to all who have allowed themselves open communion with the land."  - Edward Abbey

"Flawless--. As painstakingly crafted and as         resonant as a good classical guitar."  - The New York Times Book Review

"Richly allusive, moving, compassionate."                 - The Philadelphia Inquirer

"Lopez succeeds in awakening our fleeting      yearnings and hidden feelings. This book should be savored for the force of its imagery and the magic of its prose."  - Houston Chronicle

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 128 pages
• Publisher: Vintage; 1st Vintage Books ed edition (November 2, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0679781412
• ISBN-13: 978-0679781417
• Product Dimensions: 5.1 x 0.3 x 8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 5.9 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #506,613 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars For Two Stories..., June 5, 2000

By 

C. J. Carter (Sierra Madre, California, United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Winter Count (Paperback)

It seems an earlier reviewer had the same feelings as I about this book; I would just say - buy it for 'The Woman Who Had Shells' and 'The Orrery'. Both are twists of simple, magical stuff.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The magic of words, February 10, 2004

By 

Patricia Kramer (Madison, WI USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Winter Count (Paperback)

This book will send you to the dictionary while taking your breath away. Other reviewers have mentioned the phrase, "If one is patient...if you are careful, I think there is probably nothing that cannot be retrieved" from the story, The Orrery. Later in the story, The Location of the River, Lopez recounts the belief that " the history of the earth was revealed anew each spring in the shapes of the towering cumulus clouds that moved over the country from the north and west". Powerful, glorious statements.

The language in this book is so wonderful, I can only let Barry Lopez speak for himself. Two others. From ,The Woman Who Had Shells,"We carry such people with us in an imaginary way,proof against some undefined but irrefutable darkness in the world.".

For the readers, from ,The Lover of Words, "He did not wish to be distracted from...sequence in a life of readings, whereby one book leads by diaphanous but ineluctable threads to the next".

Let the thread of your reading lead you to this book.

5.0 out of 5 stars No small wonder . . ., July 28, 2005

By 

Ronald Scheer "rockysquirrel" (Los Angeles) - See all my reviews
(TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Winter Count (Paperback)

This collection of ten early short stories by Barry Lopez seems written more than a little under the influence of Borges. Elegantly told, they are designed to evoke a deep sense of wonder in the reader. The settings are often remote - the open prairie, the desert - and touch on what feel like the remote worlds of other cultures and other times, especially Native American.

The title story refers to the Indian practice of keeping a record of tribal history by representing the one most significant event of each year as a picture on a buffalo robe. In this story, a modern-day scholar immersed in the subject of this lost tradition is himself lost and out of place at a conference of academics.

One man becomes fascinated by a French mansion built on the Montana-North Dakota border in the 1860s. Another, an early explorer of the West, attempts to uncover the mystery of a disappearing river in 1840s Nebraska. Still another, in the 1960s - like a chapter out of Castaneda - finds an Indian in the Arizona desert, who conjures a vision of the universe from an arrangement of stones lying in the sand. In the small-scale domesticities of modern fiction, it's hard to find imaginative writing of this kind. I highly recommend these stories as an escape from the everyday and the ordinary.