The Snyder-Wilcox Expedition on Denali in 1967 was not only North America’s most tragic mountaineering incident—seven deaths—but also one of the most reported, most recently by Andy Hall in Denali’s Howl (2014). Add Jessica Goodfellow’s Whiteout (University of Alaska Press) to the bibliography. Goodfellow’s uncle was one of the lost climbers, and these poems explore her family’s loss and grief.

Cinema Vertigo (Imaginary Mountain Surveyors) is Gripped publisher David Smart’s second historical novel set in the wartime Alps, following Beyond the Reich. Here, Smart fictionalizes the story of the filming of First Man on the Rope, Nazis included. Grand storytelling on the big stage.

Gisèle Villeneuve’s Rising Abruptly (University of Alberta Press), a collection of seven short mountain fictions, won the Banff Mountain Book Award for fiction and poetry in 2017. Villeneuve writes, “Even the unassuming day trips deliver their moments.” The stories, too, are unassuming. The mountains they portray are at once familiar and fresh: We know them but have never quite viewed them through this lens. And, “the moments”? The author delivers them: glinting shards of glass scattered throughout her fields.

– David Stevenson