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jennyshank's review against another edition
4.0
http://www.dallasnews.com/entertainment/books/20111223-book-review-west-of-98-and-best-of-the-west-2011.ece
Book review: West of 98 and Best of the West 2011
By JENNY SHANK Special Contributor, The Dallas Morning News
Published: 23 December 2011 07:01 PM
“Westerners have been reminded … that we are interesting in some of the same ways that cavemen or headhunters are interesting,” writes Montana novelist Russell Rowland in West of 98, one of two new anthologies published by the University of Texas Press. But what’s clear from these collections, one of fiction and the other of essays, is that Westerners are curiosities to ourselves as much as we are to outsiders.
The 20 stories in the fiction collection, Best of the West 2011, display a wide range of styles and structures, with a few common themes recurring — the primacy of characters’ interaction with gorgeous, yet treacherous, Western landscapes; their penchant for road trips; and their frequent bouts of criminal behavior.
K.L. Cook vividly imagines a boy’s encounter with legendary outlaws in Depression-era Texas in the moving “Bonnie and Clyde in the Backyard.” Meth addicts steal the identities of unsuspecting Nebraskans in Judy Doenges’ “Melinda.” A bereaved couple unknowingly enjoys a moment of respite amid the ongoing drug war in Nuevo Laredo in Peter LaSalle’s elegant “Lunch Across the Bridge,” while an Oklahoma couple reignites old sparks when they play chicken with oncoming traffic in Aaron Gwyn’s startling “Drive.”
In Ron Carlson’s “Escape from Prison,” an embezzling banker retreats to his Colorado cabin after his malfeasance is discovered. The narrator of Claire Vaye Watkins’ clever, epistolary “The Last Thing We Need” reveals a shooting that has haunted him his entire life. In Shawn Vestal’s innovative “Opposition In All Things,” Rulon Warren returns from World War I to the Idaho Mormon community where he grew up and is possessed by the spirit of a gun-toting pioneer forebear, who urges him to go down with his gun blasting.
The essayists featured in West of 98, which the novelist Rowland edited with Lynn Stegner, are of a more law-abiding sort than the characters in Best of the West. Fans of contemporary Western American literature will recognize most of the authors — the editors gathered contributions from many of the most eloquent writers in the region.
They approach the question of what it means to be a Westerner from a variety of angles — geological, environmental, personal and political, to name a few. Some essayists pick an unexpected aspect of the topic to approach, such as in Louise Erdrich’s lyrical tribute to prairie grass (“Big Grass”) and Walter Kirn’s cranky fist shake toward cruel Montana winds (“Livingston Blows”).
West of 98 contains several fist-shaking essays, most of them lamenting environmental degradation. It’s the same as it ever was, writes Patricia Nelson Limerick: “Mourning the devastation of ecosystems, the loss of free-flowing rivers, the homogenization of once distinctive communities, and the constriction of a legendary freedom, Westerners have established themselves as the master practitioners of eulogy and elegy.”
But there are just as many funny essays, particularly those that confront Western stereotypes. Tom Miller moved from the East Coast to Tucson in his 20s and made a living out of selling colorful stories to The New York Times. What “editors valued most was stories [that] evoked the Old West with dirt roads, dusty boots, and barbed wire.” Miller hung a sign over his typewriter: “Remember: Cowboys amble, businessmen stride, mariachis stroll.”
Montana-based Jim Harrison notes in “Geopiety,” “If the mountains were actually ennobling I would have noticed it by now.” In “On Language: A Short Meditation,” Kim Barnes misses the way she and her Idaho-by-way-of-Oklahoma family used to talk: “My people’s language was crick and ain’t and every g dropped from ing.” And Colorado novelist Laura Pritchett confesses, “I do not like to gut fish,” in “Cowboy up, Cupcake? No Thanks,” her rousing call for an expansion of the types of characters featured in the literature of the West.
Pritchett might enjoy Alyssa Knickerbocker’s tender and charming story, “Same As It Was When You Left” about a 13-year-old girl in Washington state who witnesses her family dissolve. It’s a fresh take on the age-old theme of losing a parent, with nary a Western stereotype to be found.
The strong new voices in Best of the West 2011, alongside perennial favorites such as Carlson, Antonya Nelson and Rick Bass, whose work appears in both collections, prove there’s no need to write an elegy for the literature of the region.
Jenny Shank was the Books Editor of New West and her first novel, The Ringer, was a finalist for this year’s Reading the West Award.
West of 98
Living and Writing the New American West
Edited by Lynn Stegner and Russell Rowland
(University of Texas Press, $21.95)
Best of the West 2011
New Stories from the Wide Side of the Missouri
Edited by James Thomas and D. Seth Horton, foreword by Ana Castillo
(University of Texas Press, $21.95)
Book review: West of 98 and Best of the West 2011
By JENNY SHANK Special Contributor, The Dallas Morning News
Published: 23 December 2011 07:01 PM
“Westerners have been reminded … that we are interesting in some of the same ways that cavemen or headhunters are interesting,” writes Montana novelist Russell Rowland in West of 98, one of two new anthologies published by the University of Texas Press. But what’s clear from these collections, one of fiction and the other of essays, is that Westerners are curiosities to ourselves as much as we are to outsiders.
The 20 stories in the fiction collection, Best of the West 2011, display a wide range of styles and structures, with a few common themes recurring — the primacy of characters’ interaction with gorgeous, yet treacherous, Western landscapes; their penchant for road trips; and their frequent bouts of criminal behavior.
K.L. Cook vividly imagines a boy’s encounter with legendary outlaws in Depression-era Texas in the moving “Bonnie and Clyde in the Backyard.” Meth addicts steal the identities of unsuspecting Nebraskans in Judy Doenges’ “Melinda.” A bereaved couple unknowingly enjoys a moment of respite amid the ongoing drug war in Nuevo Laredo in Peter LaSalle’s elegant “Lunch Across the Bridge,” while an Oklahoma couple reignites old sparks when they play chicken with oncoming traffic in Aaron Gwyn’s startling “Drive.”
In Ron Carlson’s “Escape from Prison,” an embezzling banker retreats to his Colorado cabin after his malfeasance is discovered. The narrator of Claire Vaye Watkins’ clever, epistolary “The Last Thing We Need” reveals a shooting that has haunted him his entire life. In Shawn Vestal’s innovative “Opposition In All Things,” Rulon Warren returns from World War I to the Idaho Mormon community where he grew up and is possessed by the spirit of a gun-toting pioneer forebear, who urges him to go down with his gun blasting.
The essayists featured in West of 98, which the novelist Rowland edited with Lynn Stegner, are of a more law-abiding sort than the characters in Best of the West. Fans of contemporary Western American literature will recognize most of the authors — the editors gathered contributions from many of the most eloquent writers in the region.
They approach the question of what it means to be a Westerner from a variety of angles — geological, environmental, personal and political, to name a few. Some essayists pick an unexpected aspect of the topic to approach, such as in Louise Erdrich’s lyrical tribute to prairie grass (“Big Grass”) and Walter Kirn’s cranky fist shake toward cruel Montana winds (“Livingston Blows”).
West of 98 contains several fist-shaking essays, most of them lamenting environmental degradation. It’s the same as it ever was, writes Patricia Nelson Limerick: “Mourning the devastation of ecosystems, the loss of free-flowing rivers, the homogenization of once distinctive communities, and the constriction of a legendary freedom, Westerners have established themselves as the master practitioners of eulogy and elegy.”
But there are just as many funny essays, particularly those that confront Western stereotypes. Tom Miller moved from the East Coast to Tucson in his 20s and made a living out of selling colorful stories to The New York Times. What “editors valued most was stories [that] evoked the Old West with dirt roads, dusty boots, and barbed wire.” Miller hung a sign over his typewriter: “Remember: Cowboys amble, businessmen stride, mariachis stroll.”
Montana-based Jim Harrison notes in “Geopiety,” “If the mountains were actually ennobling I would have noticed it by now.” In “On Language: A Short Meditation,” Kim Barnes misses the way she and her Idaho-by-way-of-Oklahoma family used to talk: “My people’s language was crick and ain’t and every g dropped from ing.” And Colorado novelist Laura Pritchett confesses, “I do not like to gut fish,” in “Cowboy up, Cupcake? No Thanks,” her rousing call for an expansion of the types of characters featured in the literature of the West.
Pritchett might enjoy Alyssa Knickerbocker’s tender and charming story, “Same As It Was When You Left” about a 13-year-old girl in Washington state who witnesses her family dissolve. It’s a fresh take on the age-old theme of losing a parent, with nary a Western stereotype to be found.
The strong new voices in Best of the West 2011, alongside perennial favorites such as Carlson, Antonya Nelson and Rick Bass, whose work appears in both collections, prove there’s no need to write an elegy for the literature of the region.
Jenny Shank was the Books Editor of New West and her first novel, The Ringer, was a finalist for this year’s Reading the West Award.
West of 98
Living and Writing the New American West
Edited by Lynn Stegner and Russell Rowland
(University of Texas Press, $21.95)
Best of the West 2011
New Stories from the Wide Side of the Missouri
Edited by James Thomas and D. Seth Horton, foreword by Ana Castillo
(University of Texas Press, $21.95)
jennyshank's review against another edition
3.0
http://www.newwest.net/topic/article/community_ties_trump_outlawry_in_best_of_the_west_2010/C39/L39/
Community Ties Trump Outlawry in “Best of the West 2010”
An annual anthology brings to light new voices in Western American literature.
By Jenny Shank, 1-17-11
Best of the West 2010: New Stories from the Wide Side of the Missouri
Edited by James Thomas & D. Seth Horton
University of Texas Press, 246 pages, $19.95
Kent Meyers‘ insightful foreword, “Why All the Law?” is one of the best pieces in the 2010 edition of the recently revived annual anthology of Western short fiction, Best of the West. Meyers makes a cogent argument about what distinguishes Western American literature from any other regional literature. Meyers writes, “the outlaw has a peculiar relationship to Western American literature.” Often in Western lit, the outlaw is a “royal” figure, somehow deposed from power and left to make his existence on the outskirts of society. Meyers compares this glorification of outlaws to the tendency of some Western people to try to free themselves from the reach of law, taxes, and other trappings of government, as did Warren Jeffs. “The West makes promises to fictional kings,” Meyers writes, “it offers resources of space and land and solitude.”
Meyers’ conclusion seems eerily prescient in light of the recent assassination attempt against Representative Gabrielle Giffords in Arizona: “Literary authors find, as well as invent, their stories. In the American West, those stories often spring out of a concern with how the individual, so easily tempted toward moral solipsism, manages, or doesn’t, to stay connected to the needs of others, and so keeps from becoming a law unto himself. If an examination of these forces is what Western writers tend toward, it’s a gift the nation needs right now as it struggles with the conundrum of remaining true to its own laws while facing those who would not merely break the law but destroy it.”
Meyers makes his case out of examples from recent history and outlaw-packed Western stories, such as Owen Wister’s The Virginian, the Clint Eastwood movie Unforgiven, and Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men. Apart from one uncaught murderer in Daniel Orozco’s “Only Connect,” some Arizona outlawry in Justin St. Germain’s “Tortolita,” and some male menace in Aurelie Sheehan‘s suspenseful “Gentle Future,” most of the stories in Best of the West belong to a different strain in Western literature than the outlaw tendency Meyers discusses.
Instead, many of these stories depict people living within the laws of their Western communities, caring for one another, or trying to navigate the rules of particular subcultures, such as the world of NCAA pole vaulters that Darren Dillman vividly depicts in “Cloudcroft,” or the life of a team of biologists studying grizzlies in Julia Glass’s expertly crafted “The Price of Silver.” One character, Amadeo Padilla in Kirstin Valdez Quade’s riveting “The Five Wounds,” hopes portraying Jesus in a Good Friday reenactment of Christ’s passion will render him distinctive and worthy in the eyes of his small New Mexico community.
William Kittredge’s lovely “Stone Boat,” about a group of cowboys driving a herd of Mexican steers shipped up from the Sonoran desert to Oregon, concludes with a swift, tender evocation of the way one of the young men participating in the drive comes to settle into his place in the community: “The boy dreamed of Sonora, and blossoming orange trees, a land he could only imagine. Back in Eugene, he fell in love, fathered children, grew old, told them this story.”
The perks of Western community are lovingly portrayed in Ron Carlson‘s sweet, funny story “Victory at Sea,” in which the aging bachelor Stan Craig purchases a “once-in-a-lifetime” dual-axle boat trailer because the asking price is so low. Craig does not own a boat, and his business partner and the other people in town rib him about his “invisible boat.” The town’s postmistress takes an interest in him, and asks him for a boating date, but trouble ensues when a neighbor persuades Stan to use the trailer to move an enormous rusty bear trap. The people in this story care deeply for one another, and despite an impressive, fiery disaster at its climax, they help each other land safely.
Natalie Diaz movingly conveys a Mojave woman’s devotion for her diabetic, double amputee grandmother in the spirited “How To Love A Woman With No Legs.” Diaz pulls off the tricky second-person point of view through striking detail. Diaz writes, “The night she died you unraveled all the God’s eyes you’d ever made for her because you wanted God to know what it felt like without eyes—like she felt without legs, like you felt without her.”
The lure of the land is not always enough to keep the characters content in their Western communities—in Ben Kostival’s “Islanders,” a woman leaves her husband behind after decades of living in Fairbanks, Alaska for warmer weather in the lower 48. In Dina Guidabaldi’s quirky, funny, “The Desert: A Field Guide,” a wife moves against her will with her husband to the desert, a landscape she detests, because “maybe I believed that love trumped desert like paper covered rock.”
The stories Best of the West 2010 by some long-reigning champs of Western lit such as William Kittredge, Ron Carlson, and Kent Nelson are wonderful, but more exciting are the new voices this collection brings to light, including the young New Mexico native writers Kirstin Valdez Quade and Darren Dillman, Arizona’s Natalie Diaz, and Texas-based Dina Guidubaldi.
Community Ties Trump Outlawry in “Best of the West 2010”
An annual anthology brings to light new voices in Western American literature.
By Jenny Shank, 1-17-11
Best of the West 2010: New Stories from the Wide Side of the Missouri
Edited by James Thomas & D. Seth Horton
University of Texas Press, 246 pages, $19.95
Kent Meyers‘ insightful foreword, “Why All the Law?” is one of the best pieces in the 2010 edition of the recently revived annual anthology of Western short fiction, Best of the West. Meyers makes a cogent argument about what distinguishes Western American literature from any other regional literature. Meyers writes, “the outlaw has a peculiar relationship to Western American literature.” Often in Western lit, the outlaw is a “royal” figure, somehow deposed from power and left to make his existence on the outskirts of society. Meyers compares this glorification of outlaws to the tendency of some Western people to try to free themselves from the reach of law, taxes, and other trappings of government, as did Warren Jeffs. “The West makes promises to fictional kings,” Meyers writes, “it offers resources of space and land and solitude.”
Meyers’ conclusion seems eerily prescient in light of the recent assassination attempt against Representative Gabrielle Giffords in Arizona: “Literary authors find, as well as invent, their stories. In the American West, those stories often spring out of a concern with how the individual, so easily tempted toward moral solipsism, manages, or doesn’t, to stay connected to the needs of others, and so keeps from becoming a law unto himself. If an examination of these forces is what Western writers tend toward, it’s a gift the nation needs right now as it struggles with the conundrum of remaining true to its own laws while facing those who would not merely break the law but destroy it.”
Meyers makes his case out of examples from recent history and outlaw-packed Western stories, such as Owen Wister’s The Virginian, the Clint Eastwood movie Unforgiven, and Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men. Apart from one uncaught murderer in Daniel Orozco’s “Only Connect,” some Arizona outlawry in Justin St. Germain’s “Tortolita,” and some male menace in Aurelie Sheehan‘s suspenseful “Gentle Future,” most of the stories in Best of the West belong to a different strain in Western literature than the outlaw tendency Meyers discusses.
Instead, many of these stories depict people living within the laws of their Western communities, caring for one another, or trying to navigate the rules of particular subcultures, such as the world of NCAA pole vaulters that Darren Dillman vividly depicts in “Cloudcroft,” or the life of a team of biologists studying grizzlies in Julia Glass’s expertly crafted “The Price of Silver.” One character, Amadeo Padilla in Kirstin Valdez Quade’s riveting “The Five Wounds,” hopes portraying Jesus in a Good Friday reenactment of Christ’s passion will render him distinctive and worthy in the eyes of his small New Mexico community.
William Kittredge’s lovely “Stone Boat,” about a group of cowboys driving a herd of Mexican steers shipped up from the Sonoran desert to Oregon, concludes with a swift, tender evocation of the way one of the young men participating in the drive comes to settle into his place in the community: “The boy dreamed of Sonora, and blossoming orange trees, a land he could only imagine. Back in Eugene, he fell in love, fathered children, grew old, told them this story.”
The perks of Western community are lovingly portrayed in Ron Carlson‘s sweet, funny story “Victory at Sea,” in which the aging bachelor Stan Craig purchases a “once-in-a-lifetime” dual-axle boat trailer because the asking price is so low. Craig does not own a boat, and his business partner and the other people in town rib him about his “invisible boat.” The town’s postmistress takes an interest in him, and asks him for a boating date, but trouble ensues when a neighbor persuades Stan to use the trailer to move an enormous rusty bear trap. The people in this story care deeply for one another, and despite an impressive, fiery disaster at its climax, they help each other land safely.
Natalie Diaz movingly conveys a Mojave woman’s devotion for her diabetic, double amputee grandmother in the spirited “How To Love A Woman With No Legs.” Diaz pulls off the tricky second-person point of view through striking detail. Diaz writes, “The night she died you unraveled all the God’s eyes you’d ever made for her because you wanted God to know what it felt like without eyes—like she felt without legs, like you felt without her.”
The lure of the land is not always enough to keep the characters content in their Western communities—in Ben Kostival’s “Islanders,” a woman leaves her husband behind after decades of living in Fairbanks, Alaska for warmer weather in the lower 48. In Dina Guidabaldi’s quirky, funny, “The Desert: A Field Guide,” a wife moves against her will with her husband to the desert, a landscape she detests, because “maybe I believed that love trumped desert like paper covered rock.”
The stories Best of the West 2010 by some long-reigning champs of Western lit such as William Kittredge, Ron Carlson, and Kent Nelson are wonderful, but more exciting are the new voices this collection brings to light, including the young New Mexico native writers Kirstin Valdez Quade and Darren Dillman, Arizona’s Natalie Diaz, and Texas-based Dina Guidubaldi.
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