Book Reviews

We Live in WaterJess Walter192 pages, softcover: $14.99.Harper Perennial, 2013. In 13 sharp, witty stories, Spokane’s Jess Walter captures the gritty, quirky and heartbreaking lives of a variety of Pacific Northwesterners. Walter convincingly inhabits each character he creates, from a hungry meth addict wheeling an enormous TV toward a hoped-for pawnshop payout to a blue-collar […]

Works Cited: An Alphabetical Odyssey of Mayhem and MisbehaviorBrandon R. Schrand221 pages, softcover:$16.95. University of Nebraska Press, 2013. Brandon R. Schrand’s second book, Works Cited: An Alphabetical Odyssey of Mayhem and Misbehavior, retraces the Idaho author’s life through his obsessive love of literature. Each personal essay is paired with notes about a book that influenced […]

Little CenturyAnna Keesey336 pages, paperback:$16.Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2013. When Esther Chambers moves to central Oregon from Chicago in 1896, she finds herself caught in a range war between cattle ranchers and sheepherders. Anna Keesey’s elegant debut novel, Little Century, resurrects the complex West of those early days, in prose that captures the rhythms and […]

Mary CoinMarisa Silver322 pages, hardcover: $26.95.Blue Rider Press, 2013. Halfway through Marisa Silver’s crystalline new novel, Mary Coin, two women’s lives converge near a frost-blighted field of peas in Depression-era California. Vera Dare, a government photographer, aims her camera at a rumpled migrant family. Her thoughts drift to her own children: two young boys sent […]

The Searchers: The Making of an American LegendGlenn Frankel405 pages,hardcover: $28.Bloomsbury, 2013. In a memorable scene in John Ford’s 1956 Western, The Searchers, gun-toting cowboys ride through Utah’s stark red landscape, flanked by war-painted Native Americans. “At the heart of the matter … was land,” writes Glenn Frankel, director of the School of Journalism at […]

The Five Acts of Diego LeónAlex Espinoza304 pages, hardcover: $26.Random House, 2013. Diego León, the protagonist of Alex Espinoza’s second novel, makes his way to the U.S. during the turmoil of the Mexican revolution, hoping to achieve stardom at a time when Hollywood’s major studios each “had a Latin actor under contract.” Espinoza, who was […]

SpectacleSusan Steinberg137 pages, softcover: $14.Graywolf Press, 2013. San Francisco-based writer Susan Steinberg experiments with form and structure as she examines the roles men and women play in her arresting story collection, Spectacle. “The woman,” she writes, “is supposed to know the subtle difference between being a woman and performing one.” An unnamed woman narrates these […]

Benediction: A NovelKent Haruf258 pages, hardcover: $25.95.Knopf, 2013. Death hovers over Benediction, the latest of novelist Kent Haruf’s books about the eastern Colorado town of Holt. Two earlier works are called Plainsong and Eventide, and the liturgical nuances of the titles seem fitting as this benevolent Colorado novelist bids farewell to a dying world. A […]

100 Tricks Every Boy Can Do: How My Brother DisappearedKim Stafford202 pages, softcover: $16.95.Trinity University Press, 2012. One of the happy consequences of reading Kim Stafford is that he makes you want to become a better person. The Portland-based author of 12 books of poetry and prose writes with a quiet gentleness, intimacy and kindness. […]

Short Nights of the Shadow Catcher: The Epic Life and Immortal Photographs of Edward CurtisTimothy Egan412 pages, hardcover: $28.Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2012. In Short Nights of the Shadow Catcher, Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Timothy Egan, who also won the National Book Award in 2006 for The Worst Hard Times, chronicles the life story of photographer Edward […]

Canvas of Clay: Seven Centuries of Hopi Ceramic Art. Edwin L. Wade and Allan Cooke, 248 pages, softcover: $40. El Otro Lado, 2012. In Canvas of Clay, the authors explore the evolution of Hopi pottery from the 14th century until recent times. Pairing full-page color prints with scholarly narrative, historical photographs with schematic drawings, the […]

The Inventor and the Tycoon: A Gilded Age Murder and the Birth of Moving PicturesEdward Ball447 pages, hardcover: $29.95.Doubleday, 2013. Leland Stanford appeared to have it all: As president of the Big Four Associates, who built the Western half of the transcontinental railroad, the tycoon became one of 19th century San Francisco’s most influential entrepreneurs, […]

Passage to Wonderland. Michael A. Amundson, 208 pages, hardcover: $35. University Press of Colorado, 2012. In 1903, photographer Joseph Stimson rode in a horse-drawn buggy along a new 50-mile route leading from Cody, Wyo., to the east entrance of Yellowstone National Park. He stopped periodically to take pictures for a display at the 1904 World’s […]