Fiction Trade Paperback
ISBN-10: 1-932961-36-4 / ISBN-13: 978-1-932961-36-2
5½ x 8¼ / 256 Pages / $14.95 / April 2007
Fiction Hardcover
ISBN 1-932961-19-4
5½ x 8¼ / 256 Pages / $23.95 / May 2006
Summary | Praise | Excerpt | Reading Guide | Widgets | Bio | Events
“To read Lloyd Zimpel’s superb new novel (his first in 40 years and well worth the wait), “A Season of Fire & Ice,” is to be reminded, in gripping detail, of the pride we can all take in immigrant American grit….Zimpel tells his tale with masterful economy, and yet with a rich linguistic vein that brings the 1880s alive as swiftly as his compendious knowledge of the detail of farming a century and more ago. As a novelist, and not just as a historian, he is also the master of his craft…a true page-turner. The suspense, as the neighborly drama unfolds, tightens like a tourniquet. Compare the hold such a tale exerts on the imagination to the experience of reading contemporary novels in which so much anguish is expended on a life of so few rigors, as opposed to the Praegers’ seasons, as Zimpel says, of fire and ice. …But these are not pages of poverty-stricken lives. At the worst of times, the food Ma Praeger manages to conjure up will make the reader salivate. The fields may be barren when times are hard, but human resourcefulness is celebrated on every page of Zimpel’s book, and there is a glory in it. It’s this, and not only the suspenseful writing, that makes “A Season of Fire & Ice” so hard to put down. This is a splendid book, and it belongs on every reader’s bookshelf as a reminder of the forging of America.”—The San Francisco Chronicle
“Zimpel has crafted a bone-chilling ending worthy of the likes of Cormac McCarthy…. elegant and memorable.”—The Denver Post
“Recall[s] both the austere emotional ground of Annie Proulx and the contradictory machismo of Jim Harrison.”—The Rocky Mountain News
“A skillful evocation of a time, a place, a temperature.…a stark morality tale told with tongues of fire in a landscape of ice.”—January Magazine
“[A] richly envisioned story…. convincing . . . precise, insightful style . . . What is most remarkable is the way the lives of Zimpel’s characters and the land they live upon are inseparable.”—The Salt Lake Tribune
“With his second novel, essayist and short story writer Zimpel (Meeting the Bear; Journal of the Black Wars) has written a memorable work of historical fiction in the vernacular of 1880s upper Midwest settlers…Zimpel keenly depicts the hard existence of these settlers, who are often put under by floods, blizzards, pestilence, and drought. With their strong family loyalty, sense of fairness, deep respect for animals, and willingness to help friends and neighbors when catastrophe strikes, the people who inhabit this story are fundamentally commendable folks. And in their world it is fitting that when malice occurs, a sense of justice ultimately prevails. A worthwhile addition to all historical fiction collections and larger library fiction collections.”—Library Journal
“A beautifully written novel that offers strong character portrayals.”—Booklist
“Zimpel conveys a strong sense of place in a novel based partly on his grandparents’ lives and pioneer journals…The author incorporates some vivid, sense-evoking descriptions into his story…I was compelled to find out what would happen…Readers of this book will intensely experience the anguish of the 19th century high plains farmer…”—Historical Novels Review
“Lloyd Zimpel tells the classic frontier story. The one with lots of snow, fire, hardship and despair. Edith Wharton wrote the beautiful, tragic, New England version in Ethan Frome. Annie Proulx addressed it more recently in Close Range: Wyoming Stories and Willa Cather did the sunnier Nebraska version in My Antonia. Zimpel has chosen the Dakota Territory in the 1880s. And mentioning the name of this 75-year-old novelist in comparison with these three masters is no exaggeration… The final scene is so unexpected and appropriate, I wish I could describe it without ruining reading pleasure, but I can’t….Zimpel looks at male anger and envy, especially on the frontier, as a trigger to dangerous feuds that go on for generations. A violent, snaky confrontation roiling out of those emotions fuels the final third of the book…Zimpel’s book would make a fine, dramatic film too, though there’s no surprising cultural twist as in “Brokeback Mountain.” But if literate examples of the classic pioneer story ever make a comeback, here’s one you might hurry to read before you see the movie. Because the movies are never as good.”—The Durango Herald
“Zimpel is able to accomplish this simultaneous emotional stimulation upon both characters and readers in an unusual way: by fracturing the points of view that the story has been told from up to a certain point, by leading both characters and readers along a safe path to a point of relative knowledge and security and then abruptly cutting the strings, shifting the perspective, and even the main focus of the whole narrative, to something else entirely. As I read I thought, ‘Wow, what nerve on Zimpel’s part.’ This is the kind of risk-taking in which too few novelists, in my opinion, are willing to engage….There’s a lot to seek out here. In addition to some of the things we’ve touched on there is rich, sophisticated symbolism of all kinds; the texture and cadence of the pose at times moves towards the beautiful; and, upon a second and third reading, the care with which the author sets up and prepares for scenes in episodes that have come before becomes more apparent and more appreciable. This novel is a big achievement, and one that reminds us of how great fiction can instruct us in how to understand our world a little better.”—Peter Quinones, The Bohemian Aesthetic“Lloyd Zimpel’s A SEASON OF FIRE AND ICE is similar to both PLAINSONG and PEACE LIKE A RIVER in the beauty of the language, its compelling story, and the sweeping harsh landscape.” —Cathy Langer, Buyer, Tattered Cover Bookstore (CO)
“What a wonderful novel – the sense of place is so strong I felt I was there experiencing the challenges of prairie homesteading myself. What struck me most was Zimpel’s ability to depict Praeger’s internal tensions, and his striving to maintain a good relationship with a neighbor that often mystified him.”—Maryjude Hoeffel, Bookin’ It Bookstore (MN)
“This book both chilled me and moved me – there is so much about every day living we take for granted! This is a part of our history (whether or not our ancestors struggled in the Dakotas or struggled in the paper mills of New Jersey!). A very well written and moving story – I was transported many times. Thank you for letting me read this one…”—Pam White, Skyland Books (NC)
Lloyd Zimpel was born and raised in the Upper Midwest. He now lives in San Francisco, where for many years he worked for the California Fair Employment Practice Commission. He is the recipient of an NEA fiction fellowship, and the author of a previous novel, Meeting the Bear, as well as numerous short stories.
By God, says Beidermann, but you are a tough customer to please. You do not like my team and you do not like my dogs. Is there anything else about me that you do not like?—But if he wants an answer he does not wait for it.
He turns away to tie his handsome team to a sapling, and retrieves his ax from the sledge, and hefts it from hand to hand as its flared blade glints: he has shown it to me before—a tool from the Old Country, he claims, in a manner as to say it has magical quality.
Throughout the forenoon the clouds lower and the weather grows gray. We sit on the trimmed logs to take our dinner of the wurst and cheese and hardboiled eggs Ma has packed. Beidermann eats his meat and bread with lard without talking and, finishing, wipes his mouth with the back of his mitten and pronounces: It will snow some.
The twins receive this with the gravity they give all Beidermann’s opinions, even ones as unremarkable as this, and stop kicking snow at one another to cast sober eyes to the sky and to Beidermann and to me—as if I might challenge Beidermann’s certainty, as I am often more than willing to do, if only to deflect somewhat the twins’ excessive admiration of him: and while I have not been much successful at this before, I lose more ground now; for Beidermann flatters them by requesting they take his team—his mighty Percherons!—to skid out the logs that remain. To be offered the reins of Pegasus would thrill the lads no more; as with dwarf hands on the leviathan’s bridles into the woods they plunge, and with manly cries come thundering forth, a snubbed log pitching behind in a rain of scraped bark and ice, as the two leap nimbly through the whipping hazelnut branches and dead blackberry vines.
Beidermann’s snow comes; with little wind the large flakes, fat with wetness, descend through the still sky in such abundant quantity as to obscure us from each other and muffle the sound of Beidermann’s steady ax. . . .
His sledge is near loaded; and I go to bring my team forward, to take on the last load, as the snow falls near as thick as fog, to mute the sound that now comes to my ears: a queer, grunting bellow, like the belly-deep groan of a man wrenching himself from a nightmare. (I have heard it since, in my mind, often.) I cannot see Beidermann; and the twins, at a distance into the brush, draw up at the ugly sound and look back to me, knowing I am not its source, but for assurance that no threat lies in it.
I cannot offer it; for I am no less alarmed than they, and it is with dread that I push through the brush to where the sound of Beidermann’s ax has ceased.
He lies an arm’s length from its bloodied blade; upon his side, on one elbow, like a man reclining at a Sunday picnic. But he lies on no pretty blanket upon shaded grass; but instead in a bed of trampled, dirty snow and torn branches, and he twists his face around through a screen of falling snow and in a quiet rage says, Now I have done it, for damned sure.
