Rebecca Rukeyser presents The Seaplane on Final Approach

A bristling, lusty coming-of-age tale set against the unforgiving backdrop of the much-mythologized bounty of Alaskan wilderness.

Eighteen-year old Mira has come to the idyllic Lavender Island Wilderness Lodge on the remote Kodiak Archipelago to work as a baker and housekeeper for the season—but her plans are more perverse than just a summer job. She’s also gleefully nursing twin obsessions: a working theory of what constitutes “sleaze” and the erotic pursuit of a young fisherman she deems the embodiment of all things deliciously sleazy.

But as Mira soon discovers, things are not what they seem on Lavender Island. Enter a jovial, predatory patriarch; unnerving chef with a shady (if not criminal) past; sparring roommates in pursuit of experiences of their own; and Mira’s own spectral past that won’t seem to stay put in the lower forty-eight. As frictions spark in the homestead, our observant Mira comes to realize that, behind the carefully curated façade of Alaskan purity, the deepest needs and most naked desires of human nature can actually be much more dangerous than the bears and snow-capped mountains of the Kodiak wilderness.

Equal parts humanly tender and darkly comedic, told in tableaus of carnal fantasy fraught with yearning and teenage naiveté, with a profound reverence for the natural world, THE SEAPLANE ON FINAL APPROACH is a daring and psychologically razor-sharp coming-of-age story that brilliantly illuminates the mirage-thin line between the artificial and the feral.

Rebecca Rukeyser is the recipient of the inaugural Berlin Senate Department of Culture grant for non-German literature. Her fiction has appeared in such publications as ZYZZYVA, The Massachusetts Review, and Best American Nonrequired Reading. She earned her MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and has taught creative writing at Bard College Berlin and Heinrich Heine University, Düsseldorf. The granddaughter of Muriel Rukeyser and great granddaughter of Robinson Jeffers, she is originally from California and has lived and worked in South Korea, Japan, Turkey, and China. She currently lives in Berlin with her husband.

Asali Solomon’s latest novel, The Days of Afrekete has been called “a feat of engineering” by the New York Times. She is also the author of Disgruntled and Get Down: stories. Her previous novel, Disgruntled, was named a best book of the year by the San Francisco Chronicle and The Denver Post. Her debut story collection, Get Down, earned her a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award and the National Book Foundation’s “5 Under 35” honor, and was a finalist for the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award. Her work has appeared in O, The Oprah Magazine, Vibe, Essence, The Paris Review Daily, McSweeney’s, on NPR, and in several anthologies including The Best Short Stories of 2021: The O. Henry Prize Collection. Solomon teaches fiction writing and literature of the African Diaspora at Haverford College.

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