Incomplete History of the American West

Gabriel Urza is a writer, attorney, and university professor from Reno, Nevada. He teaches fiction in the MFA program at Portland State University. He is the author of the novels The Silver State and All That Followed, as well as and The White Death: An Illusion and The Las Supper. He lives in Hood River, Oregon.

"Gabriel Urza is a master at his craft. He writes powerfully in the emerging genre of Postfrontier fiction, that is, writing that reimagines the American West. I love the structure of this book; it's formally innovative and audacious in its storytelling. The writing is deceptively simple—straightforward and unsentimental. As a writer myself, I'm in awe of Urza's scope of place. It has an avid curiosity about place, and our place in it." —Nina McConigley, author of How to Commit a Postcolonial Murder: A Novel"I've been looking for stories like these for years. Gabriel Urza's An Incomplete History of the American West is breathtaking, each story a snapshot of an always changing West. A West brutal in its infancy, lost between hope, greed, and racism in its adolescence, and wayward in its adulthood. Urza's stories are unstoppable and heaven for fans of Western Literature." —Willy Vlautin, author of The Horse, recipient of the 2025 Joyce Carol Oates Prize

• Contents 1. Ghosts of the Pleistocene (13,700 bc) 2. The Findings of the Grand Jury of Lassen County: A Love Story (1872) 3. Dust, Thunder (1911) 4. Cold Travel (1974) 5. After Dark (1985) 6. Baby (1988) 7. Speed Bumps (1998) 8. Last Indian Massacre (2004) 9. Final Meeting of the Hunters of the Open Heart (2010) 10. The Burn (2012) 11. Naegleria Fowleri (2016) 12. Cassiopeia (2018) 13. Succession Acknowledgments About the Author