WITHOUT EXCEPTION: Reclaiming abortion, personhood, and freedom
Forthcoming September 3, 2024
Praise for Without Exception
“Finally a full-throated, unapologetic anthem bringing reproductive rights into galactic song. Forget bombs bursting in air and celebrate a woman warrior who has fought for her own voice and agency her whole life, and whose work has thus forged open paths for those who are on their way. I've been reading and writing alongside Pam Houston my entire adult life. Every time I felt puny or exhausted, Pam slipped me a lifeline by reminding me we're here to do good work, and when we fail, we're here to get the hell up and try again. Her writing is vivid and clear and filled with wisdom, and that wisdom changes over the years, as it should, as her aims have moved more and more into the world, into shared experience, into an ethos of love and creativity in the face of death and destruction. When trouble comes, and it always does, there is no one I'd rather stand alongside, shoulder to shoulder, hip to hip, into the revolution, as many times as it takes.
Without Exception is a body story from the inside out told with eloquence, immediacy, rage, and courage. Dear patriarchy: your cultural incarceration didn't work. Pam Houston is staging a breakout.”
—Lidia Yuknavitch, Chronology of Water, Thrust, Book of Joan
“Everyone knows what an important writer Pam Houston is; she has for decades taken as her subjects our most important and existential crises. Now, in Without Exception, Houston’s written a remarkable, lasting book about empire’s project of ensuring women find themselves “without resources and too overwhelmed to fight.” Charlie Parker famously quipped, “if you don’t live it, it won’t come out of your horn,” and that’s what I always think of when I read Houston. There is a demotic unpretentiousness, an irreducible clarity that can only come with having walked the walk, spent years doing the kind of quiet behind-the-scenes lifework that matures the spirit and affords certain rare writers a lucid integrity towards which all others must merely pretend. This to say, Houston isn’t merely an important writer, she’s also just really fucking good at writing. And risky too, formally and in her content. Houston says ugly true things she doesn’t need to say, things no one would fault her for leaving out, because she knows there’s a reader somewhere who will find the world more hospitable for having read them. To me, that's rigor. That’s love.” —Kaveh Akbar, Martyr!
Pre-order Without Exception
AIR MAIL: Letters of Politics, Pandemics, and Place
When the state of Colorado ordered its residents to shelter in place in response to the spread of coronavirus, writers Pam Houston and Amy Irvine—who had never met—began a correspondence based on their shared devotion to the rugged, windswept mountains that surround their homes, one on either side of the Continental Divide. As the numbers of infected and dead rose and the nation split dangerously over the crisis, Houston and Irvine found their letters to one another as necessary as breath. Part tribute to wilderness, part indictment against tyranny and greed, Air Mail: Letters of Politics, Pandemics, and Place reveals the evolution of a friendship that galvanizes as it chronicles a strange new world.
Order Air Mail:
DEEP CREEK
“…good writing can make you envious, no matter how foreign the terrain. Other times, you read a good memoir and find yourself wanting to track down the author and become friends. A third kind of book is so insightful and evocative, you shelve it beside other favorite and instructive titles. “Deep Creek” might just do all three.”
-Nathan Deuel for the L.A. Times
“Pam Houston is in possession of a deep, heart-achingly beautiful love for her own personal piece of earth. And as equally deep is her ability for hope. In a time where the world is either drowning, or burning, or being drilled-into, Houston’s outlook promises a better tomorrow – even if that means we’re no longer here.”
-Sara Cutaia for the Chicago Review of Books
“If Cowboys Are My Weakness was Pam Houston’s call to millions of women—blasting us with self-recognition of how we give away our own power—then her new book is the response to that call.”
-Amy Reardon for The Rumpus
"Deep Creek is a love letter to earth, animals, and the best of humanity. Pam Houston has taken our heartache and woven it back into hope. Her stories of love, loss, and a life lived in a relationship to land give us good reasons not to give up on ourselves or each other. This is the book we need right now to remind us how to endure--passionately. An unstoppable heart song." -Lidia Yuknavitch, author of The Misfit's Manifesto
"Pam Houston is the rodeo queen of American letters. In Deep Creek, her voice has never been more fully realized, and her message never more important."
-Samantha Dunn, author of Not By Accident
CONTENTS MAY HAVE SHIFTED
Stuck in a dead-end relationship, this fearless narrator leaves her metaphorical baggage behind and finds a comfort zone in the air, “feeling safest with one plane ticket in her hand and another in her underwear drawer.” She flies around the world, finding reasons to love life in dozens of far-flung places from Alaska to Bhutan. Along the way she weathers unplanned losses of altitude, air pressure, and landing gear. With the help of a squad of loyal, funny, wise friends and massage therapists, she learns to sort truth from self-deception, self-involvement from self-possession.
At last, having found a new partner “who loves Don DeLillo and the NHL” and a daughter “who needs you to teach her to dive and to laugh at herself”—not to mention two dogs and two horses—“staying home becomes more of an option. Maybe.”
SIGHT HOUND
Postfeminist toughness and post-hippie sentiment are the alternating currents of this wry, tender novel by Houston about a Colorado playwright and her beloved Irish wolfhound. Rae hasn’t had much luck with men, but her love for her dog Dante is pure and uncomplicated. When he is diagnosed with cancer, she puts all of her energies into prolonging his life, volunteering him for experimental surgery. The ups and downs of the three years he spends in remission are narrated from the perspective of the motley friends who float in Rae’s out-sized orbit. Chief among these is Howard, the adorably histrionic actor whose love is Rae’s main consolation for the looming loss of Dante; there’s also Darlene, Rae’s tough-as-nails housekeeper, who keeps things running at the ranch while Rae’s at her Denver apartment or traveling to exotic places…Houston’s gift for capturing the dynamic of unorthodox webs of relationships is on pleasing display in this gruffly warmhearted novel. -Publisher’s Weekly, Starred Review
A LITTLE MORE ABOUT ME
In Pam Houston’s can’t-put-down collection of essays, A Little More About Me, she describes her globe-trotting adventures spanning five continents with candor and humor, but it’s the emotional journey that hits home. We travel vicariously as Houston treks through the Himalayan kingdom of Bhutan or dozes while a pride of lions passes her Botswana campsite, but we’re right there with her when she talks about her anger-filled childhood, her lifelong obsession with weight, and of course, a penchant for strong, silent types. Her willingness to put herself at risk is her way of coping with these insecurities–each victory on skis or in hiking boots a triumph over those nasty demons. Houston’s writing is straightforward and doesn’t get mired in innuendo–she tells it like it is. And because she’s not afraid to admit her fears and mistakes, we truly root for her to achieve the balance she’s seeking. -Jill Fergus, Amazon.com
WALTZING THE CAT
Pam Houston, best-selling author of Cowboys Are My Weakness, returns to the subject of relationships in her captivating new book, Waltzing the Cat. This time, her heroine is Lucy O’Rourke, a bright, successful landscape photographer in her early thirties, whose life, nonetheless, “seems like one false start after another, way too much up and down to keep winding up at the very same place.” More often than not, that “place” is an unsatisfying relationship. Convinced that “anybody is better than nobody,” Lucy takes up with a string of men bound to hurt and disappoint her. In these 11 intertwined and insightful stories, we meet Gordon, the lover turned stalker with “a jealous streak as vicious as a heat seeking missile”; blond, beautiful Carter, who is so physically and emotionally distant that Lucy dubs their relationship “virtual love”; and Erik, a brilliant Norwegian, who “keeps it together to the tune of a fifth and half of tequila a day.”
-Beth Duris, Book Page
COWBOYS ARE MY WEAKNESS
“Every once in a while I come across a book like Pam Houston’s book, Cowboys Are My Weakness, which serves not just to reinforce my love of writing and reading, but also reaches inside to do something much greater: reinforce the joy of being alive.
This first collection of short stories by this now established author focuses on narrators who live out west and find themselves time and again learning the same lessons. They learn how to love the wrong man, how to leave him, and how to handle being the one left. They learn what it means to take pride in themselves and at the end of the day try to figure out a way to be happy with who they are and who they want to become.”
- Laura Dave, Renaissance Magazine