With tales from the tribal peoples of Greenland, Canada, Siberia, Alaska, Japan, and the polar region, told and retold during months-long winter nights, Northern Tales gathers together a rich diversity of traditions and cultures, spanning the Way-Back Time through the coming of the first white explorers. By turns tragic and comic, fantastic and earthy, frivolous and profound, this collection transports the reader to the haunting, little-known world of the far North, with all its fragile majesty and power. Howard Norman is the author of numerous books, most recently Devotion, In Fond Remembrance of Me, and The Bird Artist. He was twice a finalist for the National Book Award in fiction and has received a Lannan Literary Award, three National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships, a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship, and the Harold Morton Landon Prize in translation from the Academy of American Poets. He is a professor of English at the University of Maryland, College Park.