Nobody Gets Out Alive

1. Howl Palace HOWL PALACE
THIS SEPTEMBER, I FINALLY PUT Howl Palace up for sale. Years of poor financial planning had led to this decision, and I tried to take some comfort in my agent's belief in a buyer who might show up with an all-cash offer. My agent, Silver, was a highly organized, sensible woman who grew up in Alaska-I checked-but when she advertised the listing, she failed to mention her description on the internet. "Attractively priced teardown with plane dock and amazing lake views," she wrote under the photo. "Investment potential."

I am still puzzled as to why the word "teardown" upset me. Anybody who buys a house on Diamond Lake brings in a backhoe and razes the place to rubble. The mud along the shoreline wreaks havoc with foundations, and the original homes, like mine, were built in the sixties, before the pipeline, back when licensed contractors had no reason to move to Anchorage. If you wanted a house, you either built it yourself, or you hung out in the parking lot of Spenard Builders Supply handing out six-packs to every guy with a table saw in the back of his vehicle until one got broke enough or bored enough to consider your blueprints. Which is why the walls in Howl Palace meet the ceiling at such unconventional angles. Our guy liked to eyeball instead of using a level.

To the families on the lake, my home is a bit of an institution. And not just because the wolf room, which Silver suggested we leave off the list of amenities, as most people wouldn't understand what we meant. About the snow-machine shed and clamshell grotto, I was less flexible. Nobody likes a yard strewn with snow machines and three-wheelers, one or two of which will always be busted and covered in blue tarp. Ours is just not that kind of neighborhood. The clamshell grotto, on the other hand, might fail to fulfill your basic home-owning needs, but it is a showstopper. My fourth husband, Lon, built it for me in the basement as a surprise for my fifty-third birthday.

Leigh Newman's debut collection Nobody Gets Out Alive was longlisted for the National Book Award. Her stories have appeared in Harper's, The Paris Review, The Best American Short Stories, One Story, Tin House, Electric Literature, American Short Fiction, and McSweeney's Quarterly Concern. Her memoir about growing up in Alaska, Still Points North, was a finalist for the National Book Critic Circle's John Leonard prize. In 2020, she was awarded a Pushcart Fiction Prize and an American Society of Magazine Editor's Fiction Prize, as well as received the Paris Review's Terry Southern Prize for "humor, wit, and sprezzatura." When not writing, she takes care of her two kids, two dogs, two chickens, and beloved, disgruntled cat.

"The women in this absorbing debut collection are larger than life, perhaps because this is what the harsh Alaska landscape demands ... These stories are rich with wit and wisdom, showing us that love, marriage, and family are always a bigger and more perilous adventures than backcountry trips ... Bighearted stories of domestic discord by a writer with a cleareyed view of Alaska's romance and hardscrabble realism."-Kirkus Reviews (starred)

"From Newman, whose memoir Still Points North was a finalist for the National Book Critic Circle's John Leonard Prize, Nobody Gets Out Alive highlights women struggling to get by in rugged Alaska."-Library Journal, pre-pub alert

"I have never been to Alaska, but it came alive for me from many wonderful angles in Leigh Newman's irresistible fiction debut. I didn't want Nobody Gets Out Alive to end - to have to leave behind its warmth and soul and glittering writing, its honesty and its laughter in the dark. The stories in these pages are, as one memorable character in this book observes of another's tall tales, 'funny and self-lacerating and so horrifically precise about our love and fury for each other.' You feel you're in the company of a writer who has embraced unpredictability and breathes deeply while seeing far."-Jonathan Lee, author of The Great Mistake

"The stories in Nobody Gets Out Alive are big and lush, full of exuberance, sorrow, and swagger. The characters roam highways, rivers, backwoods, and bus routes searching for something immense. Their boundless needs and vast hopes have nowhere to go except Alaska-a place that Newman brings wholly to life for us, alongside delight and devastation."-Chia-Chia Lin, author of The Unpassing

"Nobody Gets Out Alive is a thrilling collection. Leigh Newman's indelible characters chart the turbulent waters of hope and regret in an Alaskan landscape that crackles with danger and wonder. These are gritty and powerful stories, from a wildly