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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.
PREVIOUS SELECTIONS
Click here for June 2009 Selections
Click here for August 2009 Selections
Click here for October 2009 Selections
Click here for December 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 Brian Hart
Published by Bloomsbury USA
(distributed by Macmillan)
A riveting, psychologically rich family drama set in the American West, this debut novel is from a writer who has been compared to Cormac McCarthy.
Bandy Dorner, home from Vietnam, awakes with his car mired in a canal, his cabin reduced to ashes, and his pregnant wife preparing to leave town with her lover. Within moments, a cop lies bleeding on the road. Eighteen years later, Bandy is released from prison. His parents are gone, but on the derelict family ranch, Bandy faces a different reunion. Tracy, his now teenaged son, has come to claim the father he’s never known. Iona, Bandy’s ex-wife, has returned on the heels of her son. All three are damaged, hardened, haunted. But warily, desperately, they move in a slow dance around each other, trying to piece back together a family that never was; trying to discover if they belong together at all.
With unflinching honesty and restrained beauty, Brian Hart explores the possibilities and limitations of his characters as they struggle toward a shared future. Like a traditional Greek tragedy, suffused with the mud, ice, and rock of the raw Idaho landscape, THEN CAME THE EVENING is tautly plotted and emotionally complex—a stunning debut.
"Hart's accomplished debut follows Vietnam vet Bandy Dorner, who wakes up from a drunken bender to discover the cabin he shared with his pregnant wife, Iona, has burned to the ground and she is believed to have died in the fire. After Bandy gets in a scuffle with two policemen that ends with one cop dead and Bandy shot through the shoulder, he learns that Iona has, in fact, left with her lover. Fast forward to 1990, when Bandy's 18-year-old son, Tracy, visits his incarcerated father for the first time and soon moves into Bandy's dead parents' home, intent on fixing it up. After Iona joins Tracy, and Bandy gets released from prison, a brilliant depiction of family follows, though there's a great deal of turbulence before things even hint at coming together. The rugged Idaho backdrop adds sometimes stark, sometimes beautiful counterpoints to the stripped-to-the-bone narrative. Most impressive is Hart's ability to conjure rich and conflicted characters in an uncommon situation; his handling of the material is sublime." -Publishers Weekly
“[Brian Hart] shows us the hidden America, a world of remote holdings, long memories, fierce yearnings, and violent strivings. He dramatizes this world with an immense care and tenderness. There is a deep feeling in the book for the gnarled landscape itself, its stark beauty, but even greater emotion surrounds the characters that inhabit it. Their efforts to live together and love each other are depicted with a grace and understanding which is rare and memorable.”
-Colm Tóibín, author of BROOKLYN
Born in Idaho, Brian Hart spent years working as a janitor, carpenter, welder, and commercial fisherman before earning his M.F.A. from the Michener Center for Writers at the University of Texas at Austin. He was the winner of the 2006 Keene Prize, the largest student prize for literature at the University of Texas.
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by Alyson Hagy
Published by Graywolf Press
(distributed by Farrar Straus & Giroux)
An unsentimental vision of the West,
new and old, comes to life in a gritty
new collection of stories from the
author of SNOW, ASHES.
Alyson Hagy explores the hardscrabble lives and terrain of America’s least-populous state. Beyond the tourist destinations of Jackson Hole and Yellowstone lies a less familiar and wilder frontier defined by the tension wrought by abundance and scarcity. A young runaway with a big secret slips across the state border and steals a collie pup from the Meeker County fairgrounds. A chorus of trainmen details a day spent laying rail across the Wyoming Territory, while contemporary voices describe life in the oil and gas fields near Gillette. A traveling preacher is caught up in a deadly skirmish between cattle rustlers and ranchers on his way from Rawlins to the Indian reservation on the Popo Agie River. Locals and activists clash when a tourist makes an archaeological discovery near Hoodoo Mountain.
With spirited, lyrical prose, Hagy expertly weaves together Wyoming’s colorful pioneer and speculator history with the not-often- heard voices of petroleum workers, thrill-seeking rock climbers, and those left behind by the latest boom and bust.
"In her fourth collection of short stories, Hagy explores the lonely state of the Equality State, with its literally and figuratively haunted inhabitants. Hagy has an ear for the locals and a feel for the vast lonely landscape, capturing modern issues like small ranchers' struggles with wolves and environmentalists, and the small details of late nights in pickups and the gradual erosion of Wyoming's landscape. The stories range in tone from the moody mysteriousness of “Border,” about a drifter boy and his dog, and the grimness of the life of early rail workers in “Brief Lives of the Trainmen,” to humor, as in “Superstitions of the Indians.” [This collection ...] features a strong, dark current of empty lands, wandering spirits, and dread."
-Publishers Weekly
“Alyson Hagy writes about the historic and contemporary ghosts of Wyoming as if she has lived there for two hundred years…. She inhabits each character completely, tells the hard and heartbreaking tales of their barely redeemed lives with compassion and clarity, in prose as lyric and arresting as the great state itself.” -Pam Houston
“We’re in luck again out west. Here’s another first-rate storyteller. Alyson Hagy knows our lingo, our lands and people, our heartbreaks and glories, and our tragedies and sustaining myths, and how each runs through the others. Read and enjoy. Hope for more.” -William Kittredge
Alyson Hagy was raised on a farm in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia. She is the author of three previous collections of short fiction and two novels, KEENELAND and SNOW, ASHES. She lives and teaches in Laramie, Wyoming.
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