Ethan Rutherford

Ethan Rutherford was born in Seattle, studied at Williams College and earned an MFA in fiction at the University of Minnesota. He taught at Macalester College and the University of Minnesota before joining the English department at Trinity College in Connecticut in 2014. His stories have appeared in Ploughshares, One Story, American Short Fiction, Tin House and The Best American Short Stories.

Water, cold and doomed expeditions run through his work. His first collection opens with the title story, which imagines the crew of the Confederate submarine H. L. Hunley, a vessel that killed its own men. Other stories there are plainer domestic fiction, so the book shifts between realism and survival tale. At Trinity he also teaches horror, sea narratives and the history of American whaling, and North Sun grows out of that interest.

The Peripatetic Coffin and Other Stories (Ecco, 2013) won a Minnesota Book Award and was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction. A second collection, Farthest South, followed from A Strange Object in 2021. North Sun, his first novel, was longlisted for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize and was a 2025 National Book Award finalist in fiction.

Start with North Sun. It follows the crew of the whaleship Esther out of New Bedford in 1878, sent north to find a missing captain in the Chukchi Sea. A plain rescue mission turns stranger as the ice closes in. If you like the way he handles danger and confinement, The Peripatetic Coffin is the natural next step. Its stories are shorter and more varied.