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9780826328588 Academic Inspection Copy

The River in Winter

New and Selected Essays
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First time in paper, these essays are an extension of the author's previous books Mayordomo and A Garlic Testament. This book is like Stanley Crawford's floor. The floor began more than thirty years ago when Crawford moved his family to New Mexico after selling movie rights to his first novel. The history of their home-made house is written in the hand-plastered floor, patched and sealed over the years. At first a reminder of how little he and his wife knew about working with mud, the floor has become beautiful in the years since 1971. It embodies their lives, the ways things have changed and the ways things have stayed the same. "A mud floor is perfectly sustainable, being infinitely repairable and finally recyclable." "Reflections in Mud," Crawford's essay about the floor, is one of the many pieces collected in this book about his life in northern New Mexico. The novelist who didn't know how to lay a mud floor is now a seasoned farmer, irrigator, and northern New Mexico villager, and the essays on these subjects that he has been writing since the 1980s continue the work he began in Mayordomo and A Garlic Testament as an articulator of values that are out of synch and out of scale with the suburban lives of most Americans in the twenty-first century. Whether he is writing about the river whose water irrigates his land, the plants and animals with which he lives, or the continuing struggle he and his neighbors must engage in if their small farms and farmers markets are to survive, Crawford's thoughtful, witty essays are the kinds of summing up that his fans have been cutting out of periodicals for years. Now that they are in book form we can all throw away the clippings, reread the essays, and give the book to friends who have yet to discover the pleasure of reading Stanley Crawford.
Stanley Crawford was a New Mexico garlic farmer, the owner since 1970 of El Bosque farm in Dixon, New Mexico, and the author of twelve books of fiction and nonfiction, including Mayordomo: Chronicle of an Acequia in Northern New Mexico, winner of the Western States Book Award for Creative Nonfiction, and A Garlic Testament: Seasons on a Small New Mexico Farm.
" Crawford writes with poetic precision, offering readers a chance to connect with nature, celebrate the commonplace and remember that we are all related."-- "Pasatiempo" "In this delightful collection of essays, Mr. Crawford focuses on the beauties and pleasures of his natural surroundings and on small victories of self-sufficiency 'in a massively wasteful world.' "-- "Dallas Morning News" "These are essays about economics of a different scale--about the sale of goods, garlic, and basil and the particulars of running a small village. These simple tales provide a tiny grounded amount of sanity in a country fixated on the Dow."-- "Rain Taxi Review of Books"
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