Northland Stories

by Jack London, Jonathan Auerbach (Introduction)

Northland Stories comprises nineteen of Jack London's greatest short works.

Includes:

The white silence
The son of the wolf
In a far country
To the man on trail
The wisdom of the trail
An odyssey of the north
The God of his fathers
Siwash
Grit of women
Where the trail forks
The law of life
Keesh, the son of Keesh
The death of Ligoun
Li Wan, the fair
The league of the old men
The story of Jees Uck
Love of life
The Sun-Dog Trail
To build a fire

Genres: Short Stories, Fiction, Classics, 20th Century, Anthologies, Literature

320 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1997

About the author

John Griffith Chaney, better known as Jack London, was an American novelist, journalist and activist. A pioneer of commercial fiction and American magazines, he was one of the first American authors to become an international celebrity and earn a large fortune from writing. He was also an innovator in the genre that would later become known as science fiction.

London was part of the radical literary group "The Crowd" in San Francisco and a passionate advocate of animal rights, workers’ rights and socialism. London wrote several works dealing with these topics, such as his dystopian novel The Iron Heel, his non-fiction exposé The People of the Abyss, War of the Classes, and Before Adam.

His most famous works include The Call of the Wild and White Fang, both set in Alaska and the Yukon during the Klondike Gold Rush, as well as the short stories "To Build a Fire", "An Odyssey of the North", and "Love of Life". He also wrote about the South Pacific in stories such as "The Pearls of Parlay" and "The Heathen".

Reviews

[Dean · Rating 5 out of 5]

Awesome collection of short stories by Jack London!!!
Quite the best I've read for years..

Jack London is of course a trade name for adventure, Alaska, Indians, the Yukon river..
Not only his novels are superb, but also his short stories manage to cringe under your skin and make you shiver and think!!

The only thing I felt saddened about was as this marvelous collection of short stories came to an end..
It hurt my heart to have finished it, I did enjoy it so very much..

I cannot pick any of the short stories and label it as my favorite one, because all the stories in this collection are indeed awesome, wonderful and amazing!!

If you are lucky enough to dare reading this collection of short stories, here comes my advice to you:
Put on your mittens and keep warm, but most of all don't let important appointments require your attention, because you will missed them!!!

Happy readings

Dean;)

[Unwisely · Rating 1 out of 5]

If your life needs more old-timey racism and sexism, you should definitely read this book.

I tried, I really did. But it was so, so painful. (Which is exactly why I don't read books more than 100 years old, bingo square chooser.) Illustrative sentence from the point at which I finally gave up (p 140/279):

"But she, like the women of all her race, was born to obey the will masculine, and when Hitchcock repeated 'Go!' he did it with authority, and though she made no answer he knew that his will was law."

Ugh.

[Mike Clinton · Rating 4 out of 5]

These stories are most often so compelling and richly written that they almost cause you to overlook London's racial triumphalism and crude Social Darwinism. Those themes are so relentlessly omnipresent in the stories, though, that it's hard to shrug them off as a forgivable relic of the time. Still, an honest critique should acknowledge that the stories are exciting, engaging, and vivid, which is why I rate it at 4 stars. My favorites were "In a Far Country", "Keesh, Son of Keesh", and "The Story of Jees Uck"; some of the stories became monotonous in their drawn-out accounts of freezing, starvation, misery, etc., and "The God of His Fathers" plays off of a hackneyed and predictable cliche. It's clear from this collection why London was so wildly popular a storyteller in his time - and even in our time for many.

[Carolyn · Rating 2 out of 5]

these stories are pretty hit or miss, but it was definitely cool to read a bunch of them while in alaska.

[William Graney · Rating 4 out of 5]

Jack London + the Yukon always makes for a riveting reading experience.

[Christos Karayiannis · Rating 5 out of 5]

I could say that this is one of JL's best novels, even that it is JL's best novel, but I would rather say it is one of the best novel collection I have ever read. Last Christmas a Greek newspaper offered a book, a translation of 'Christmas Dinner', that includes a short story collection by various authors. The story that I liked the most was JL's and I considered to give a try to 'Northland Stories', since I
suspected it must include this story. I wasn'r certain because I could not search remotely for this story in the Northland book table of contents before I bought it because the translated title was different from the oringinal, which now is called 'To the Man on Trail'.
Northland Stories are not all even and their themes involve endurance in the wildrness, endless trips with the dog sled in the snow, and also a number of miscegenation studies between native Indians, Americans and others (e.g. Russians) in various combinations, for instance: a white man that asks for the hand of indian girl with the tribe's men to revolt against this, an indian woman that discovers she was stolen from Americans when young and how this affects her indian husband, an indian man wants to get married to an indian woman but the tribesmen disagree because he was turned to a Christian, a white man that stoles an indian wife with her husband seeking her for years and many more.
Northland stories is a selection of dream-like (or sometimes nightmarish) stories with sometimes unexpected ending and vivid descriptions of the hazardous situations. Various characters reappear from one story to the other and even White Fang makes a guest star appearance. To me it is different to understand why other similar JL's stories like The Call of the Wild take so much attention when the Northland collection remains relatively unknown to readers. Certainly you can recommend the Call of the Wild to a 10 years old child but can't most of the Northland stories.
People that follow me in my reviews (currently counting zero) will know that I have the charisma to identify authors that have influenced others by comparing their works. It probably needs no special powers to discover that E. Hemingway, no matter what books his favourite lists of literature works included, no other author influenced him more in developing the mastery he forged the language than Jack London, especially with this specific story collection.
Another JL story collection I'll check next is the South Sea Tales, which I suspect will be the counterpart to Northland stories for more sunny environments.

[David Sterritt]

It’s always a grim pleasure to read Jack London, and Jonathan Auerbach’s edition of his “Northland Tales” reconfirms his mastery of ordeal stories, focusing on people caught in seemingly impossible situations, over which they occasionally prevail, as in “Love of Life” and “The Story of Jees Uck,” and to which they very often succumb, as in the celebrated “To Build a Fire” and numerous others. Auerbach makes a somewhat tangled effort to deal with London’s racial notions, and they’re an inseparable part of the package, but what matters most to me is his extraordinary storytelling skill. Each time I think I’ve had enough he pulls me back in and keeps me turning the pages, and his detailed accounts of life in incorrigibly frigid realms are more than worth the price of admission. Recommended!

[Kübra · Rating 3 out of 5]

At first I didn't quite understand it, but later I liked it, I enjoyed it, the story was good. The ending was surprising too.