Synopses & Reviews
The first comprehensive collection of Eskimo folktales in over sixty years. these stories reveal a tradition close in spirit to modern fiction. Not for queasy readers. A Kayak Full of Ghosts deals with strange and even gruesome events in the barren Arctic where, in the minds of the story-tellers, all manner of behavior is imaginable. Mythic and beautiful, violent and scatological, these tales come from an oral tradition that bars few holds. Here you will meet a memorable gallery of characters: children who eat their parents: hunters who kill their prey by breaking wind: men who marry rocks: women who marry their sons' wives: old people who wed insects; women with iron tails; children who grow antlers; a shaman who turns himself into any animal he wants; and animals who obtain their body parts by stealing from the human dead. Taken together, these stories portray a rich culture in a remote land, where eerie flowers bloom in the floes of the human mind.