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READING THE WEST
from Mountains & Plains
Read! Exceptional new books and authors
from the Mountains & Plains region.
Relax! Titles have been chosen with care by
independent booksellers in the region.
Refresh! New selections will be introduced
at regular intervals throughout the year.
OTHER SELECTIONS
Click here for June 2009 Selections
Click here for August 2009 Selections
Click here for October 2009 Selections
BOOKSTORE DISPLAY
Please click here or the image above
to view the Reading the West bookstore
display at Maria's Bookshop in
Durango, Colorado.
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by Phillip Caputo
Published by Random House/Knopf
From the acclaimed author of ACTS OF FAITH, a blistering new novel about the brutality and beauty of life on the Arizona-Mexico border and about the unyielding power of the past to shape our lives.
Taking us from the turn of the twentieth century to our present day, from the impoverished streets of rural Mexico to the manicured lawns of suburban Connecticut, from the hot and dusty air of an isolated ranch to New York City in the wake of 9/11, Caputo gives us an impeccably crafted story about three generations of an Arizona family forced to confront the violence and loss that have become its inheritance.
When Gil Castle loses his wife in the Twin Tower attacks, he retreats to his family’s sprawling homestead in a remote corner of the Southwest. Consumed by grief, he has to find a way to live with his loss in this strange, forsaken part of the country, where drug lords have more power than police and violence is a constant presence. But it is also a world of vast open spaces, where Castle begins to rebuild his belief in the potential for happiness—until he starts to uncover the dark truths about his fearsome grandfather, a legacy that has been tightly shrouded in mystery in the years since the old man’s death.
When Miguel Espinoza shows up at the ranch, terrified after two friends were murdered in a border-crossing drug deal gone bad, Castle agrees to take him in. Yet his act of generosity sets off a flood of violence and vengeance, a fierce reminder of the fact that while he may be able to reinvent himself, he may never escape his history.
Philip Caputo worked nine years for the Chicago Tribune and shared a Pulitzer Prize in 1972 for his reporting on election fraud in Chicago. He is the author of six other works of fiction and two memoirs, including A RUMOR OF WAR, about his service in Vietnam.
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by Christine Montalbetti
translated by Betsy Wing
Published by Dalkey Archive Press
Setting out to tell the story of a mysterious cowboy—a stranger in town with a terrible secret—Christine Montalbetti is continually sidetracked by the details that occur to her along the way, her CinemaScope camera focusing not on the gunslinger’s grim and determined eyes, but on the insects crawling in the dust by his boots.
A collection of the moments usually discarded in order to tell even the simplest and most familiar story, WESTERN presents us with the world behind the clichés, where the much-anticipated violence of the plot is continually, maddeningly delayed, and no moment is too insignificant not to be valued.
Montalbetti’s daring theft of movie technique and subversion of a genre where women are usually relegated to secondary roles—victims, prostitutes, widows, schoolmarms—makes WESTERN a remarkable wake for the most basic of American mythologies.
A novelist, playwright, literary critic, and theorist, Christine Montalbetti is also a professor of French literature at the University of Paris VIII. She has written five novels.
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