Western Literature and Fiction – serie

Clark's classic novel is a compelling tale of four men who fear a marauding mountain lion but swear to conquer it. It is also a story of violent human emotions--love and hate, hope and despair--and of the perpetual conflict between good and evil.

Reno private investigator Jack Ross has been in the desert for six months when his respite is interrupted by television reporter Miranda Santee. She need's Jack help to solve a story. Miranda has an old photograph of two Las Vegas showgirls who allegedly robbed a mobster of one million dollars thirty years earlier. One of the women is dead, the other missing. Only one piece of the story can pull Ross out of the desert—the dead showgirl was his mother. Now, the man who always believed his mother’s death was an accident must find out if she was murdered.

The world of acclaimed Native American poet Adrian Louis is harsh and full of pain—the blizzard-blasted plains and dusty towns of the northern Midwest, the hopeless barrenness of the Reservation, and a bleak interior world of loss, illness, and despair. Louis’s poems bring us to a place where ghosts hitchhike and the traditional pow-wow becomes an affirmation of bitter survival, where the lives of the young end too often in acts of meaningless self-destruction, and where his own existence becomes a daily battle with his cherished wife’s decline into the dementia of Alzheimer’s disease. Louis is a writer of extraordinary courage and skill, and these powerful, moving poems, wrested from the harsh experience of the Rez and his own lonely struggle with a merciless illness, will awe their readers with their brilliance and desperate humanity.

The indigo skies and lush vegetation of the contemporary West Coast belie the damaged souls and desperate alienation that lurk behind fading stucco walls and off the endless highways. The lives of women on the edge and beyond the margins have seldom been explored with as much power or insight as in these brilliant stories by award-winning novelist and poet Kate Braverman. In a world without succor, Braverman’s characters grope for meaning and solutions to their dilemmas. Our Lady of the 43 Sorrows must meet the bizarre needs of her severely brain-damaged mother as her own career as a soap-opera actress declines. The protagonist of ""Pagan Night"" waits with her unnamed and unwanted infant in a shabby zoo in Idaho while her partner buys dope and makes plans to reconstitute their failed rock band. And the precocious, awkward adolescent narrator of the title story watches as her elegant grandmother confronts the illness that will soon end the colorful life she has so enjoyed. Abandonment, in these wrenching stories, comes in many forms, and freedom is elusive and sometimes fraught with pain and terror. Braverman’s language is ripe, intense, as vivid as the sun-drenched California landscape, and her characters are contrary, unpredictable, and unforgettable. These haunting stories evoke the glittering expectations and shattering disappointments of the postmodern West.

Haslam divides the state into five regions, selecting prose and poetry from each that reflects their history, terrain, and culture. Many Califonias features sixty-seven authors ranging from Jack London to Maxine Hong Kingston, making it the most diverse general-interest anthology available.

Through the kindly but mysterious Basket Woman, cocky young glaciers, ancient Paiutes, and clever rabbits become the companions and teachers of Alan, the young son of homsteaders in early Nevada. The Basket Woman doesn't simply tell stories: She transports her young friend into powerful mythic tales where Alan learns the secret of the trees and animals and the wisdom of the people who flourisehd before the arrival of white settlers. A preface by Austin and a new introductgion by Austin scholar Mark Schlenz provide ample context for a multilevel appreciation of one of this remarkable writer's most important works.

Blending natural history, politics, and allegory, Mary Austin champions local shepherds in the losing battle against the quickly developing tourist business in early twentieth-century California. The Flock is based on Mary Austin's first-hand experiences. She met many shepherds while visiting the Tejon ranches of Edward Beale and Henry Miller and cultivated relationships with men others often thought of as ignorant, unambitious, and dirty, listening closely to their stories. Her neighbors were scandalized, but Austin respected the shepherds' ways of thinking. In The Flock she captures their way of life, not as part of a romantic bygone era, but as exemplifying potentially radical ways of living in and thinking about the world. She blends natural history, politics, and allegory in a genre-blurring narrative championing local shepherds in their losing battle against the quickly developing tourist business in the Western Sierra. Barney Nelson, a rancher, hunter, and environmental activist, is widely recognized as one of the most original voices in environmental literature today. She has enhanced her new afterword with a selection of never-before-published drawings by Mary Austin that were the models for the lovely, authoritative engravings in the first edition, published in 1906. The Flock, readable, informative, and perennially fresh, should bring Austin's work to a broad new audience.

In A Black Bridge, Ralph Tejeda Wilson offers both an apparently simple, lucid, palpable surface and a powerfully complex, resonant undercurrent of connotation. The title itself operates as both a symbol of connection and a literal scene. The author has a special gift for compassion, for joy, and insists that his art be put to good purpose: the redemption of individual and communal life. Compassion is allied to sharp observation, conversation allied to reflection and scrutiny.

Wallace Stegner is one of the finest American writers, teachers and environmentalists of the 20th century. While his writing, both fiction and non-fiction, was recognized by a Pulitzer Prize, a National Book Award, and many other distinctions major and minor, his legacy is much larger than any of these would suggest. In these in-depth essays, Stegner's biographer continues to explore various aspects of his career - his philosophical writing, his concern for the land, and his bedrock beliefs.

In 1968, Jackson J. Benson, then a naive young literature professor, set out to write a critical appraisal of John Steinbeck. He found his project turning into an authorized biography: this is an account of his experiences over the 15 years he devoted to writing it. On one level it is a collection of anecdotes, character sketches and memories of Steinbeck. Benson interviewed scores of people who knew Steinbeck at various times in his life, and read thousands of primary sources. On another level it is an account of the biographers task, with allist triumphs and frustrations. We follow Benson as he struggles to master the skills of the biographer: locating sources of information; learning to conduct interviews - and assess their validity; and sifting through all the contradictions and prejudices.

The ascetic and enigmatic vastness of the Great Basin has challenged the talents of many writers, but few have met the challenge as successfully as William L. Fox. In Reading Sand, Fox's elegant minimalist poems capture the essence of the Great Basin desert-its daunting emptiness, the passage of light and wind across its surfaces, its colors and textures, its silence. In ""perforated object,"" the collection's central piece, Fox uses a mysterious pierced-horn artifact discovered in Nevada's Humboldt Cave as the subject of an extended meditation on the nature of history and the absolute inscrutability of the Great Basin's complex past. The result is an intellectually provocative and aesthetically moving work of a lean grandeur rarely found in recent poetry. Fox, whose profound and insightful essays on the Great Basin have found many readers, is here at the top of his form as a poet. In Reading Sand, the Great Basin has found a voice both terse and eloquent, a voice worthy of this grand subject.

The American conquest of California is the subject of Lawrence Coates's remarkable new novel, a tale rich in magical irony, fraught with caustic truths and wrenching insights into the human condition. When Commodore Thomas Jones and the crew of the National Intention land in Monterey believing themselves to be bringing freedom and democracy to the benighted Californios, they discover that history has preceded them, that cruelty, betrayal, greed, and lust are already well established there, and that far from existing outside of history, California is a battleground for several contending versions of the past. They also find that their own limitations and illusions are far more powerful than the message of hope they intend to deliver. The motley crew of the National Intention includes a chronically seasick poet who pens an epic account of the conquest of California without ever setting eyes on the place or leaving his sickbed; a wondrously endowed captain irresistible to all women but seeking only the one who can help him escape the dark truth of his own separateness; and a crafty ex-slave who plans to abandon ship to create a new family to carry on the timeless history of his people lost on the Middle Passage. The ship's quixotic master, Commodore Jones, dedicates his acts to his chaste beloved - a woman who long ago betrayed him to marry his more successful brother. And helping to shape all their fates is a beautiful fourteen-year-old girl who escapes an unwanted marriage to a decayed septuagenarian by weaving her own magical shroud. There is also a lively set of supporting characters-land-rich dons, traders, friars, and love-starved maiden aunts, as well as dispossessed Indians whose own bitter irony has been nurtured by history. And there is the land itself-empty, enigmatic, home to vast populations of wildlife and countless herds of cattle. The Master of Monterey is filled with heartbreaking irony and raucous energy-the story of the men who claimed the West and who, far from creating history, found themselves trapped within it.

Unfolding from the bygone era of 1950s Las Vegas through the turbulent decades that followed, this epic novel examines the universal search for identity and reward in a world where the good life always seems out of reach. ""Suppose that the Great Gatsby had raised a foster son, and further suppose that that son was raised in the casinos of Las Vegas and the open spaces of Montana: Here we would have the protagonist of H. Lee Barnes's wonderful novel of loyalty, heartbreak, and redemption."" - Mary Clearman Blew, author of All But the Waltz The streets of early Las Vegas are a tough place for a boy to grow up. Pete Elkins is fatherless, living in a cramped apartment with his mother, a party girl with a penchant for falling in love with the wrong kind of man, and his older sister, grown up too young from trying to parent both her brother and their feckless mother. Pete is headed for serious trouble when he is befriended by Willy Bobbins, a casino owner with a murky past and even murkier business practices. But Willy is also deeply compassionate and wise, and he soon becomes a surrogate father for the lonely Pete. Gradually, Pete becomes involved with Willy's troubled family and comes to know both the scope of his mentor's power and the depth of his vulnerabilities. The Lucky is a powerful novel about growing up, moving from mob-dominated Las Vegas to Willy's beloved Montana ranch - which hides secrets of its own - to the battlefields of Vietnam. But the novel's greatest strength lies in its vivid and unforgettable character - casino workers and entertainers, cowboys, soldiers, petty criminals, spoiled rich kids, thrill-seekers, and the hopeless, helpless poor. And most of all, the colorful, enigmatic, and ultimately tragic figure of Willy Bobbins, a man who helped build Las Vegas but instead lost himself along the way.

Considered a classic of American nature writing, this collection of stories is essentially a frame tale set in the New York Museum of Natural History, where two children discover displays that come to life and admit them into a series of exciting adventures that include talking animals and magical travels through the vast landscapes of the pre-Columbian continent. Along the way, the children discover the lifeways of the ancient Native Americans and the natural worlds they inhabited, as well as the impact on both Indians and wildlife from contact with European explorers and Euro-Americans. Told by a variety of narrators, including some of the animals, the stories offer a perceptible and sympathetic view of the natural history of North America and Native American-white relations.

In 1950, Walter Van Tilburg Clark, author of the acclaimed novel The Ox-Bow Incident - a writer who critic John R. Milton has said ""did perhaps more than anyone else to define (in his fiction) the mode of perception, the acquisition of knowledge, and the style which we tend to call Western"" - published a collection of short stories that had already won distinction in various national magazines. The collection - Clark's only published volume of short fiction - was well received by reviewers, and subsequent critics have noted that these stories reflect both Clark's literary power and the major concerns of his novels: the interior and intuitive complexities of good and evil, and the fragile, intricate web that connects humankind to the rest of the natural world. This new paperback edition - which includes ""Hook,"" Clark's most renowned story - makes these remarkable pieces available again to a new generation of readers. A foreword by Ann Ronald, one of the West's most astute literary critics, sets the stories into the context of Clark's oeuvre and career and illuminates the way they reveal crucial characteristics of this complicated writer's imagination, Clark remains one of the West's most significant writers, one of the first to explore the complicated inter-actions between humankind and the West's vast and often haunted landscape. The stories in The Watchful Gods will offer contemporary readers fresh insight into Clark's unique genius.

The literary image of Los Angeles has evolved since the 1880s from promotional literature that hyped the region as a New Eden to contemporary visions of the city as a perplexing, sometimes corrupt, even apocalyptic place that foreshadows and reflects all that is wrong with America. In Imagining Los Angeles, the first literary history of the city in more than fifty years, critic David Fine traces the history and mood of the place through the work of writers as diverse as Helen Hunt Jackson, Mary Austin, Norman Mailer, Raymond Chandler, Joan Didion, Carolyn See, and many others. His lively and engaging text focuses on the way these writers saw Los Angeles and used the image of the city as an element in their work, and on how that image has changed as the city itself became ever larger, more complex, and more socially and ethnically diverse. First published in 2000, Imagining Los Angeles is available now for the first time in paperback. This is essential reading for anyone interested in the literature and changing image of Southern California.

Popular western writer Zane Grey was a literary celebrity during his lifetime and the center of a huge enterprise based on his writing, which included books, magazine serials, film and stage versions of his stories, even comic strips. His wife, Dolly, closely guided Grey’s career almost from its beginning, editing and sometimes revising his work, negotiating with publishers and movie studios, and skilfully managing the considerable fortune derived from these activities. Dolly maintained the façade of a conventional married life that was essential to Grey’s public image and the traditional middle-class values his work reflected. This façade was constantly threatened by Grey’s numerous affairs with other women. The stress of hiding these dalliances placed a huge strain on their relationship, and much of Zane and Dolly’s union was sustained largely by correspondence. Their letters - thousands of them - reveal the true nature of this complex partnership. As edited by Candace Kant, the letters offer an engrossing portrait of an extremely unorthodox marriage and its times.