In this landmark work, Allen Morris Jones spends a year exploring one of the wildest ecosystems in North America, hunting and examining the philosophical issues of blood sport. In the process, he creates both a compelling defense for the hunt as well as one of the tradition’s first formal ethics.
If you’re a hunter, A Quiet Place of Violence will help put into words those aspects of the hunt that you have found most essential; and if you’re a non-hunter, it will offer insight into the allure of this otherwise puzzling pursuit.
About Allen Morris Jones
Author of a highly-acclaimed novel, Last Year’s River (Houghton Mifflin), co-editor with William Kittredge of The Best of Montana’s Short Fiction, and the author of more than one hundred published short stories, articles, essays, and poems, during his twenty-year career in publishing Allen Morris Jones has worked as Editor of Big Sky Journal, as acquisitions editor for the Lyons Press, and publishing consultant through his business, www.ManuscriptMedics.com. He has appeared on the Jim Lehrer NewsHour as a guest essayist, lectured to the Outdoor Writer’s Association of America, and seen rave reviews of his work appear on “The Today Show” and in the LA Times, People Magazine, Publisher’s Weekly, Booklist, and many others. He lives in Montana with his wife and young son.
Book Information
Dimensions: 5 ½ x 8 ½
Price: $16.95 Paperback, $9.99 Kindle E-Book
Release Date: May 15, 2012
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Excerpt
Of course, the animal you’re really hunting is the animal within yourself, buried under the layers of light, noise, and speed. If left undisturbed under this shell, you will finally come to believe in nothing past it—no fresh air, no growing leaves; and worse, you’ll believe that such things never existed. But if caught in time you can take a breath and consider how strangling the air inside had been, how tepid. And if you begin hunting…then! Then you dwindle, fading with each step into the ropes of grass around your legs, into the smell of pine and wood smoke and the taste of rain. You hunt until you have forgotten even your own name, losing it in the plenum of names, the diaspora, the fabric of unspoken words.
— Allen Morris Jones
From A Quiet Place of Violence
Endorsements
“I know of no recent book that explores the hunter’s ethic with more probity, more satisfying anecdote, more visceral wisdom than A Quiet Place of Violence.”
— Nick Lyons
“A rich, complex work that deserves an enduring place on the bookshelf right next to Ortega y Gasset.”
— E. Donnall Thomas, Jr.
“…at once a joy to read and an important defense of the hunt.”
— Stephen J. Bodio
“A book that everyone who has ever wondered why he hunts, how to justify killing of game, or how to answer those who criticize hunting, should read.”
— Jim Casada
