In 1987, John Rember returned home to Sawtooth Valley, where he had been brought up. He returned out of a homing instinct: the same forty acres that had sustained his family’s horses had sustained a vision of a place where he belonged in the world, a life where he could get up in the morning, step out the door, and catch dinner from the Salmon River. But to his surprise, he found that what was once familiar was now unfamiliar. Everything might have looked the same to the horses that spring, but to Rember this was no longer home. In Traplines, Rember recounts his experiences of growing up in a time when the fish were wild in the rivers, horses were brought into the valley each spring from their winter pasture, and electric light still seemed magical. Today those same experiences no longer seem to possess the authenticity they once did. In his journey home, Rember discovers how the West, both as a place in which to live and as a terrain of the imagination, has been transformed. And he wonders whether his recollections of what once was prevent him from understanding his past and appreciating what he found when he returned home. In Traplines, Rember excavates the hidden desires that color memory and shows us how, once revealed, they can allow us to understand anew the stories we tell ourselves.

Traplines: Coming Home to Sawtooth Valley

Biographies & Memoirs

Rember, John

Arts & Literature

Pantheon

Written with clarity, tenacity, humor, and warmth, A Hundred Little Pieces on the End of the World attempts to find tolerable ethical positions in the face of barely tolerable events--and the real possibility of an intolerable future. It is a compelling, surprising, disturbing, and highly literate work of reportage and contemplation. It is both a collection of gentle-spirited wisdom and a rumination on ruin, as if distilled in equal measure from the spirits of Norman Maclean's A River Runs Through It and Cormac McCarthy's The Road. Through these ten essays, each further broken into ten smaller pieces, Rember examines the practical and ethical dilemmas of climate change, population, resource depletion, and mass extinction. At the same time, he never forgets those improbable connections between human beings that lead to moments of joy, empathy, and grace.

A Hundred Little Pieces on the End of the World

History

Americas

University of New Mexico Press

Short stories follow Coyote, a Vietnam veteran, in his relationships with a variety of people, each summed up with an animal name

Coyote in the Mountains and Other Stories

Literature & Fiction

United States

Limberlost Pr

As Rember notes in his introduction, “MFA in a Box is not a How to Write Book. It’s a Why to Write Book.” By exploring the relationships between the writer and love, grief, place, family, race and violence, Rember helps writers dive deep into their own writing. He tells them how they can breathe down there and how they can get back. “A big part of writing involves grappling with the terrors and discouragements that come when you have writing skills but can’t project yourself or your work into the future,” says Rember. “My hope is that MFA in a Box will help writers balance the despair of writing with the joy of writing. It’s a book designed to help you to find the courage to put truth into words and to understand that writing is a life-and-death endeavor—but that nothing about a life-and-death endeavor keeps it from being laugh-out-loud funny.”

MFA in a Box: A Why to Write Book

Self-Help

Creativity

Dream of Things

Vintage

SUDDEN DEATH, OVER TIME does what only good satire can--tear down the artificial and the irrelevant to get to what is human. The stories are funny, insightful, disturbing, sad and always entertaining. Rember's talent in bringing interesting characters to life and letting them stumble on their own humanity in places common and extreme gives these stories an energy that sparks on every page until they conflagrate into a controlled burn.

Sudden Death, Over Time

Humor & Satire

Wordcraft of Oregon, LLC

Above all else, the characters in John Rember's second book of stories value hedonism, physical beauty, and athletic prowess. They attempt to ski, run, bicycle, ride, dance, and copulate their way to salvation. But readers of the Old Testament and The Book of Morman will also recognize that Rember's people live in places watched over by an unforgiving God, a God unamused by humankind's pretentious claims to Eden in the Post-Ironic Recreational West. And yet, despite their comic insistence upon looking for redemption in all the wrong places, Rember's characters also earn delicate, glittering, impossible moments of joy and grace.

Cheerleaders from Gomorrah: Tales from the Lycra Archipelago

Confluence Pr

Contemporary

Confluence Press

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Books by Rember, John