Western Literature and Fiction Series – Serie

Norman "Fats" Rangle, an ex-deputy sheriff, operates a horse stabling and excursion business with his brother and sister-in-law on their family ranch in the small rural community of Blue Lake, a few hours outside of Las Vegas. But fate has other plans for him when, high on a southern Nevada mountain range, Fats discovers the wreckage of a plane that crashed two years earlier. Although he reports his find to the sheriff, he does not disclose that someone had already been to the crash site—evidence that Fats deliberately destroyed.Soon, Fats is tracking back and forth between Las Vegas and Blue Lake in a search for a missing cousin, a briefcase full of cash, and finally, for a killer. Along the way, Fats also begins to understand that he's searching for himself and his place in a rapidly changing West.Angry and alienated, Fats distrusts everyone he meets, from sleaze-merchants and political power brokers to two women: one he wants to believe in, a retired judge; and one, a police sergeant, he can't quite believe isn't deceiving him. After all, in this Nevada, corruption is a given. Everybody lies. Much is uncertain—motives, loyalties, affections. But in Drowning in the Desert, one thing is certain: water is a precious resource that can both kill and be killed for.

No Charity in the Wilderness is a long journey into the new American West. From the southern border to the isolating two-lane highways in the desert, this collection is a prayer of reconciliation with so much that troubles us—those who live without resources or voices—and their possible future in this ever-changing landscape of desire.Griffin has spent many decades in the high desert trying to find the way forward—when what he knows has been challenged and still there is breath on the horizon. One day an ancient Chinese poet comes to visit: "Snow deepens/ to quiet what I once believed, and Wang Wei stoops from the spine:/ this is how you become silence." Even if you doubt the old poet's counsel, like Griffin, you want to journey with him into the wilderness.

In this collection of sixteen short stories, Robert Laxalt illuminates the Nevada of the 1950s. Written when Laxalt was in his twenties, the stories are as fresh as if they were penned yesterday. Humanity good and bad, humor and cruelty, satire and adventure are found in these early stories of a Nevada poised on the brink of change.In the lead story, Cowboy Clint Hamilton laments that the town is "getting more like a big city every day" as the traditional gambling joints of earlier times give way to the gaudy casinos that will soon become modern glitz.Sobering experiences from his days as a reporter give Laxalt an insight into murderers and prison life and lethal gas chambers. In a chilling short story, "The Snake Pen," we find the seed of Robert Laxalt's celebrated novel, A Man In the Wheatfield.

In this unconventional tale of Las Vegas during the two delirious boom decades before the bust of the Great Recession, failed actor “C. D.” Reinhart, who has launched a new career in hotel marketing, is gradually losing his moral and existential compass. Working on The Strip during an era when Sin City’s population growth was outpacing any other place in America, C. D. climbs the industry ladder while modeling himself after a Pyramid Resorts top executive, Lance Sheperd. C. D.’s professional choices lead him down a tumultuous road, as Sheperd, a complex and, at times, visionary figure, pilots his ventures through the tangled wheeling and dealing of finance and corporate politics straight into catastrophe.As the story progresses, C. D. comes to understand how his personal losses and the losses of his cohort of hard driving executives on the make—especially the tragic life of his work partner, Greta Olsson, the only woman to break through into their male dominated world—are a result of the make-believe environment he has helped to create, a world where representation replaces reality. Hoping to piece together his faltering marriage and family relationships, C. D. must find a new path as he struggles to hold onto his dreams.In this fictionalized version of the city of glittering lights, author Douglas Unger pits the ideologies of marketing and consumerism in the casino economy of America against the erosion of individual and humane values that success in that world demands. Unger reveals the hard truth that Las Vegas, a blue-collar town considered by many to be “the most honest city,” can be a temple for self-deceptions, emblematic of a service economy that knows the price of everything and too often the value of little else. Dream City becomes both a love song and an elegy for Las Vegas that sets it apart from any other literary novel previously written about this global entertainment attraction that in so many ways represents postmodern America. Sooner or later, the challenge that faces everyone is to discover what matters most, and to learn how to bet on the better angels of our natures.

The Writings of Norman Maclean: Seeking Truth amid Tragedy provides the first critical reassessment of this celebrated author's work in more than a decade. In his study, Timothy P. Schilling focuses on Maclean's attempt, in A River Runs through It and Other Stories and Young Men and Fire, to come to grips with the tragic side of human existence. From the 1938 death of his brother Paul to the 1949 deaths of thirteen firefighters in Montana's Mann Gulch wildfire, Maclean is driven by a desire to discover ultimate meaning—the truth—in the face of haunting tragedy. Through careful analysis of all of Maclean's published works, Schilling highlights the audaciousness of Maclean's quest to wrest free an answer from "the universe."Ever open to scientific, literary, philosophical, and theological ways of viewing reality, Maclean found ambiguity, paradoxically, to be an essential tool for probing the truth. Beyond exploring Maclean's use of this tool, Schilling breaks new ground by considering Maclean's invocation of the Transcendentals in "A River Runs through It," noting the sly homage Maclean pays to Izaak Walton, examining Maclean's often-neglected "Other Stories," assessing Robert Redford's film adaptation of "A River Runs through It," and providing the most thorough exploration of Young Men and Fire yet available.With this book, Schilling offers a current and complete analysis of Maclean—one of the most iconic figures in Western American literature.

Carol Henning Steinbeck, writer John Steinbeck's first wife, was his creative anchor, the inspiration for his great work of the 1930s, culminating in The Grapes of Wrath. Meeting at Lake Tahoe in 1928, their attachment was immediate, their personalities meshing in creative synergy. Carol was unconventional, artistic, and compelling. In the formative years of Steinbeck's career, living in San Francisco, Pacific Grove, Los Gatos, and Monterey, their Modernist circle included Ed Ricketts, Joseph Campbell, and Lincoln Steffens. In many ways Carol's story is all too familiar: a creative and intelligent woman subsumes her own life and work into that of her husband. Together, they brought forth one of the enduring novels of the 20th century.

In the summer of 1942, Eve Halverson assumes her dead sister's identity and leaves behind her small-town life in Washington for the promise of something new in San Pedro, California. Determined to support the war effort, she takes a job at a boot factory, stepping into an unfamiliar world of sweat, steel, and camaraderie. Among the women on the factory floor, she finds resilience, laughter, and unexpected friendships that begin to reshape her understanding of the world - and herself. But it's the quiet, captivating dockworker and blues singer Hard Times (H.T.) who truly upends her life. As Eve grows closer to H.T., she finds herself drawn into his world, one filled with music, longing, and the ever-present shadows of prejudice. Their connection forces Eve to confront realities she'd never imagined, challenging the boundaries of her own perceptions and the risks of crossing societal lines. When Eve becomes a witness to a violent crime at a blues club, her life takes a dangerous turn. As she navigates the escalating threats, she leans on the strength of her newfound friends and the fragile, complex bond she shares with H.T. Set against the vibrant yet turbulent backdrop of World War II-era California, Emerald City Blues is a heartfelt coming-of-age story. It explores the complexities of love, the power of friendship, and the courage it takes to forge your own path in an uncertain world. Eve's journey is one of discovery - not just of the world beyond her hometown, but of the resilience and strength she never knew she possessed.

In the summer of 1942, Eve Halverson assumes her dead sister's identity and leaves behind her small-town life in Washington for the promise of something new in San Pedro, California. Determined to support the war effort, she takes a job at a boot factory, stepping into an unfamiliar world of sweat, steel, and camaraderie. Among the women on the factory floor, she finds resilience, laughter, and unexpected friendships that begin to reshape her understanding of the world - and herself.But it's the quiet, captivating dockworker and blues singer Hard Times (H.T.) who truly upends her life. As Eve grows closer to H.T., she finds herself drawn into his world, one filled with music, longing, and the ever-present shadows of prejudice. Their connection forces Eve to confront realities she'd never imagined, challenging the boundaries of her own perceptions and the risks of crossing societal lines. When Eve becomes a witness to a violent crime at a blues club, her life takes a dangerous turn. As she navigates the escalating threats, she leans on the strength of her newfound friends and the fragile, complex bond she shares with H.T. Set against the vibrant yet turbulent backdrop of World War II-era California, Emerald City Blues is a heartfelt coming-of-age story. It explores the complexities of love, the power of friendship, and the courage it takes to forge your own path in an uncertain world. Eve's journey is one of discovery - not just of the world beyond her hometown, but of the resilience and strength she never knew she possessed.

A grieving mother ghost-hunts in Virginia City. A college student's field trip to the Moonlite Bunny Ranch brothel spurs a sexual awakening. A boy starts a wildfire on Peavine while trying to impress his crush. A schoolteacher is dismissed, and the aftermath unfolds in a schoolwide email chain. A woman tries on new identities at Burning Man. All must contend with their complicated histories and answer the question: is being from a place the same as being of it?   Experimental in its approach and unflinching in its execution, Matter Out of Place is an exploration of bright spots of humanity in dark underbellies, a feminist reckoning with "sin," and a love letter to the strange mirage that is northern Nevada. It inhabits physical and digital spaces with equal wariness, and its characters—filled with grit—navigate the fraught divide between appearances and reality, approval and judgment, gambling everything despite knowing that the house always wins.

Tangential Terrains is an ecocritical study of the work of Cormac McCarthy, focusing primarily on his depictions of the desert and inorganic nature in Blood Meridian. Close readings of previously unexamined archival manuscripts and drafts shed new light on McCarthy's compositional processes, revealing how the development of written matter in the novel-in-progress can correspond to geological processes like erosion, erratics, stratification, and continental drift.   Blood Meridian's emergent geoaesthetics reveals forces operating according to other-than-human principles, as literary desert terrains retain a passive resistance, or weak agency, which presents a radical disturbance of anthropocentrism, mirrored in the novel's style. Though the mediated unstable deserts in Blood Meridian defy appropriation, they are neither untouched nor untouchable: the borderlands bear the wounds and "blood meridians" of a non-chronological history of violence, tangential to the massacres of Native American and Mexican peoples depicted in the novel.  Stefanie Heine's reading of Blood Meridian offers a crucial contribution to and intervention in contemporary ecocriticism, Anthropocene criticism, and New Materialist theories, encouraging readers to critically rethink customary notions of entanglement, kinship, and agency.

The Stars That Fell infuses poetry with a new meaning for modern Nevada and the American West. Using autobiographical details and testimony mixed with Nevada history and folklore, this poetry collection focuses on and includes the scars left by the mining industry, the military complex, and the treatment of Indigenous peoples to tell the story of the complex relationship between the people and the land. Through his poems, Gary Short illuminates the humanity of the people of Nevada and the American West, specifically the rural communities that often get left out of the narrative. Focusing on family and the relationships between characters, he extends feelings of hope, solace, forgiveness, and even wisdom throughout this collection.

Tellin' It Like It Is offers a powerful introduction to Adrian C. Louis (1946–2018), one of the most unflinching Native American literary voices of the twentieth century. Drawing from a half-century of published writing—and including a few previously unpublished pieces—this collection captures the evolution of Louis's voice, worldview, and craft.Editor David Pichaske, a close friend of Louis in his later years, curates this volume with deep insight into both the public figure and the private man. Selections are arranged chronologically to trace Louis's transformation from a Nevada reservation teenager to a California hippie, a sixties hitchhiker, a Boston academic, a South Dakota reservation journalist, and finally, a Midwestern college professor.Louis's work immerses readers in reservation life, yet its critique reaches the broadest dimensions of American and human experience. To enrich understanding, the book includes literary reviews, scholarly essays (including one by a noted Polish critic), an interview with Louis, and his own reflections on literature and identity. A foreword by poet Bojan Louis provides further context for this essential collection.