Books by John Keeble

John Keeble is the author of seven previous books, including Yellowfish, Broken Ground, and The Shadows of Owls. He is also author of Out of the Channel, the definitive study of the Exxon Valdez disaster. Keeble was cofounder of the graduate creative writing program at Eastern Washington University where he taught for more than thirty years, and has taught also at Grinnell College and the University of Alabama and served as Distinguished Visiting Writer at Boise State University. With his wife Clare, he lives, in a house of his own construction, on a wooded hillside west of Spokane, Washington.

Winner of the Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Fiction, this collection of tales returns readers to the American Northwest so deftly observed and powerfully evoked in John Keeble's previous works. Nocturnal America occupies a terrain at once familiar and strange, where homecoming and dislocation can coincide, and families can break apart or hone themselves on the hard edges of daily life.

Kate DeShazer is a marine biologist whose research threatens the construction of an oil pipeline in Alaska's Chukchi Sea. A group of extremists, intimidate her, steal her records, and leave her fighting for her life. This book tells the story of a woman whose passion for her work puts herself and her family at serious risk.

2011 Outstanding Title, University Press Books for Public and Secondary School LibrariesBroken Ground employs a construction project in the Oregon desert as the basis for a story with far-reaching political and moral implications. Hank Lafleur has been sent to supervise the project, which is a prison-for-profit financed by a multinational corporation under government contract, and meant to house felons, illegal immigrants, and, as Lafleur comes to learn, political prisoners from Latin America. Broken Ground is remarkable for its prophetic vision of the hollow securities promised by incarceration and of the effects of "e;privatization"e; as an armature of American imperialism - in both the domestic and international realms.

Wesley Erks, itinerant machinist and "e;high class jack-of-all-trades,"e; takes a hefty fee for smuggling a group of illegal Chinese immigrants ("e;yellowfish"e;) from Vancouver, B.C., to San Francisco in the 1970s. Three are teenaged "e;Hong Kong boys,"e; one of whom has been grievously injured. The fourth, a fugitive and the son of a rich Chinese casino owner, means to settle a grudge with a Chinese American secret society, the Triad, but is himself being pursued. The tale of the perilous journey of these five men, along with a woman who becomes implicated in a double-cross, is filled with vivid fictional and historical characters. The whole of it conjures the story of the West itself.Click here for discussion questions for Yellowfish: http://www.washington.edu/uwpress/books/Yellowfish.pdf