Too Close to God, Selected Mountain Tales

Long, who began his career in the 1970s when magazines like

occasional ly published f iction, is wr y, imaginative, tactile and able to dip into the reser voirs of literar y symbolism. He is a lso an ef for tless stor ytel ler who never seems like an outsider to the climbing world, despite having also enjoyed a career in the mainstream publishing industr y. He says that he had once hoped to elevate climbing f iction to the rea lm of great literature, and now also hopes to inspire other writers. It’s a modest goal for a man who has had a novel on the best-sel ler’s l ist and won both the Banff Pr ize for Mountain Literature and the Boardman-Tasker Pr ize for his f iction.

There are stor ies about a couple of foreigners enter ing the climbing community in an out-of-the-way Tyrolean vil lage, an ice climber who pieces together his memories of an accident, a young climber that picks up an ancient hitchhiker who claims to have climbed Everest from the Tibetan side, and many other imaginative subjects. Each stor y is prefaced by a shor t essay explaining the writer’s process in creating it, “a window on the writing life,” says Long, who is better situated to provide such insight than most writers. “The word is the mountain,” says Long, “we climb upon our language,” and these stor ies make a powerful case for creative climbing writing’s power to help us do just that.–