Andrew Krivak

From National Book Award in Fiction finalist Andrew Krivak comes a gorgeous fable of Earth’s last two human inhabitants and a girl's journey home.In an Eden-like future, a girl and her father live close to the land in the shadow of a lone mountain. They own a few remnants of civilization: some books, a pane of glass, a set of flint and steel, a comb. The father teaches his daughter how to fish and hunt and the secrets of the seasons and the stars. He is preparing her for an adulthood in harmony with nature, for they are the last of humankind. But when the girl finds herself alone in an unknown landscape, it is a bear that will lead her back home through a vast wilderness that offers the greatest lessons of all, if she can learn to listen. A cautionary tale of human fragility, of love and loss, The Bear is a stunning tribute to the beauty of nature’s dominion.

The Sojourn is the story of Jozef Vinich, who was uprooted from a 19th-century mining town in Colorado by a family tragedy and returns with his father to an impoverished shepherd’s life in rural Austria-Hungary. When World War One comes, Jozef joins his adopted brother as a sharpshooter in the Kaiser’s army, surviving a perilous trek across the frozen Italian Alps and capture by a victorious enemy.A stirring tale of brotherhood, coming-of-age, and survival, that was inspired by the author’s own family history, this novel evokes a time when Czechs, Slovaks, Austrians, and Germans fought on the same side while divided by language, ethnicity, and social class in the most brutal war to date. It is also a poignant tale of fathers and sons, addressing the great immigration to America and the desire to live the American dream amidst the unfolding tragedy in Europe.

The stunning second novel from National Book Award finalist Andrew Krivak - a heartbreaking, captivating story about a family awaiting the return of their youngest son from the Vietnam War.In a small town in Pennsylvania's Endless Mountains Hannah and her son Bo mourn the loss of the family patriarch, Jozef Vinich. They were three generations under one roof. Three generations, but only one branch of a scraggy tree; they are a war-haunted family in a war-torn century. Having survived the trenches of World War I as an Austro-Hungarian conscript, Vinich journeyed to America and built a life for his family. His daughter married the Hungarian-born Bexhet Konar, who enlisted to fight with the Americans in the Second World War but brought disgrace on the family when he was imprisoned for desertion. He returned home to Pennsylvania a hollow man, only to be killed in a hunting accident on the family's land. Finally, in 1971, Hannah's prodigal younger son, Sam, was reported MIA in Vietnam.And so there is only Bo, a quiet man full of conviction, a proud work ethic, and a firstborn's sense of duty. He is left to grieve but also to hope for reunion, to create a new life, to embrace the land and work its soil through the seasons. The Signal Flame is a stirring novel about generations of men and women and the events that define them, brothers who take different paths, the old European values yielding to new world ways, and the convalescence of memory and war. Beginning shortly after Easter in 1972 and ending on Christmas Eve this ambitious novel beautifully evokes ordinary time, a period of living and working while waiting and watching and expecting. The Signal Flame is gorgeously written, honoring the cycles of earth and body, humming with blood and passion, and it confirms Andrew Krivak as a writer of extraordinary vision and power.

A novel of one family, a century of war, and the promise of homecoming from Dayton Literary Peace Prize winner and National Book Award finalist Andrew Krivak Rooted in the small, mountain town of Dardan, Pennsylvania, where patriarch Jozef Vinich settled after surviving World War I, Like the Appearance of Horses immerses us in the intimate lives of a family whose fierce bonds have been shaped by the great conflicts of the past century.After Bexhet Konar escapes fascist Hungary and crosses the ocean to find Jozef, the man who saved his life in 1919, he falls in love with Jozef’s daughter, Hannah, enlists in World War II, and is drawn into a personal war of revenge. Many years later, their youngest son, Samuel, is taken prisoner in Vietnam and returns home with a heroin addiction and deep physical and psychological wounds. As Samuel travels his own path toward healing, his son will graduate from Annapolis as a Marine on his way to Iraq.In spare, breathtaking prose, Like the Appearance of Horses is the freestanding, culminating novel in Andrew Krivak’s award-winning Dardan Trilogy, which began with The Sojourn and The Signal Flame. It is a story about borders drawn within families as well as around nations, and redrawn by ethnicity, prejudice, and war. It is also a tender story of love and how it is tested by duty, loyalty, and honor.

This gorgeously written memoir tells the story of one man's search for his religious calling--a search that led him to the Dominican Republic and Central Europe, to Moscow and the South Bronx, and finally into married life with a woman whose search for God coincided with his own.In 1990 Andrew Krivak--poet, yacht rigger, ocean lifeguard, student of the classics--entered the Society of Jesus. The heart of Jesuit training is the Long Retreat, thirty days of silence and prayer in which the Jesuit novice reflects on the Gospels and tests his desire for the priesthood.For Krivak, eight years of Jesuit formation turned out to be a long retreat in its own right, as he tested all his desires--for poetry, for travel, for independence, for love--against the pledge to do all "for the greater glory of God." And in this deeply affecting book the long retreat becomes a pattern for our own spiritual lives, enabling us to embrace our desire for solitude and perspective in our own circumstances, the way Krivak has in his new life as a husband, father, and writer.The search for God is finally the search for oneself, St. Augustine wrote. Krivak's story pushes past the awful stories of scandal in the Catholic Church to reveal why a modern, forward-looking man would yearn to be a priest. Unlike those stories, it has an happy ending--one in which we can recognize ourselves.

An elegiac novel of men lost in a coal mining disaster and the boy who survives to tell the story On New Year’s Day, 1929, Ondro Prach, the thirteen-year-old son of Slovak immigrants in Pennsylvania coal country, begins a new job as mule boy. He knows the danger—his father died in the mines—but he is proud of his position handling the animal that hauls cartloads of coal from shafts deep within the earth to the surface. After Ondro earns the trust of the miners and the mule in his charge, the room the men are working collapses and their fate is sealed.From that moment onward, Ondro carries the hard memory of that day, a burden that leads to addiction and imprisonment, costing him his family. But, years later, when the miners’ loved ones come searching for answers, he finds the strength to share what the men spoke of and prayed for in the pitch black.Told in incantatory prose set to the rhythm of human breath, this sublime novel turns the memento mori into a meditation not only on death but on what it takes to tunnel through darkness and live.

This new volume of poetry from National Book Award Finalist Andrew Krivak explores in supple and often terrifying lines the breathtaking landscapes of memory and the natural world for which his fiction is celebrated. From the Pennsylvania coal mines to the fields and mountainsides of New Hampshire, these poems search for order in a father’s everyday work, the changing seasons, and the myths that shape America and its people. Ghosts of the Monadnock Wolves is a poetic study in what we have lost, and what we still hold on to. A meditation in verse that deepens with each read.Advance Praise for Ghosts of the Monadnock WolvesHere in these powerful new poems that make up Ghosts of the Monadnock Wolves , Andrew Krivak presents those haunting, scintillant images he gave us earlier in The Signal Flame and The Bear : A wilderness drumming in the shadows of the Monadnock range, with its unforgiving ice, its Dantesque slopes, and the howl of those ghost wolves and coyotes. In the end, it’s a father’s hope to somehow protect one’s children against those nightmarish forces we know are beyond our control.Paul Mariani, author of Crossing Cocytus and The Great WheelAndrew Krivak’s collection, Ghosts of the Monadnock Wolves , celebrates the history of a place in the only way that matters – by giving us the people of the place. In “Lake Ice,” there’s a passage that suggests his method of poetic The narrator and his children stand on a frozen lake and watch the “auger as it turns and searches, turns and searches through each frozen layer, until water so green and cold it looks oily gushes up and settles into slush around our boots.” Krivak’s close eye for the sensory detail grounds all of these poems, and the work reminds me of Harry Humes and the early poems of James Dickey. Reader, get ready to be immersed, get ready to learn what the auger can find.Charles Rafferty, author of A Cluster of Noisy Planets

Ils ne sont que deux survivants humains, un père et sa petite fille, dans une maison au bord d’un lac. Leurs voisins ? Des arbres centenaires, des plantes millénaires, des oiseaux dont les appels trouent les ciels, des traces d’ours sur les troncs et une montagne qui n’a pas changé depuis qu’Emerson et Thoreau y puisaient leur force et leur sagesse. Au fur et à mesure que la fille grandit, son père lui apprend tout ce qu’il peut, pour la préparer à une vie en harmonie avec une nature majestueuse et tutélaire. Et quand la fille se retrouvera seule, c’est l’ours du titre qui lui servira de guide ultime pour s’orienter à travers un environnement aussi rude que prodigue, dans une communion élégiaque.