Books

Rough-Hewn Land: A Geologic Journey from California to the Rocky MountainsKeith Heyer Meldahl320 pages, hardcover: $34.95.University of California Press, 2011. Landscapes tell stories, and Western North America has no shortage of geological sagas in the making. Keith Heyer Meldahl offers a fresh account of this gripping Earth epic in Rough-Hewn Land: A Geologic Journey from […]

The Man Who Quit MoneyMark Sundeen272 pages,softcover: $15.Riverhead Trade, 2012. The title grabs your attention: The Man Who Quit Money. Intrigued, you open the book and read: “In the first year of the twenty-first century, a man standing by a highway in the middle of America pulled from his pocket his life savings — thirty […]

Before the End, After the BeginningDagoberto Gilb194 pages, hardcover: $24.Grove Press, 2011. Before the End, After the Beginning, Dagoberto Gilb’s remarkable new fiction collection, begins with an arresting story written in lowercase letters, titled “please, thank you.” The reason becomes clear when a nurse reminds the narrator that he’s suffered a stroke, much as Gilb […]

The City Beneath the Snow: StoriesMarjorie Kowalski Cole276 pages, hardcover: $ 22.95.University of Alaska Press, 2012. With her Bellwether Prize-winning novel Correcting the Landscape — a tale of journalism and urban development — Marjorie Kowalski Cole put Fairbanks, Alaska, on the literary map. Her posthumously published story collection The City Beneath the Snow again brings […]

Into the Heat: My Love Affair with Trees, Fire, Saws and MenCindy Bellinger159 pages, softcover: $14.95.High-Lonesome Books, 2011. What does it mean for one woman to take an active, eventful life and root it ever more deeply in one spot, settling down in the mountain foothills where a nearby pine forest becomes a close companion, […]

West of 98: Living and Writing the New American WestEdited by  Lynn Stegner and Russell Rowland380 pages, softcover: $21.95.University of Texas Press, 2011. Any anthology is a collage, a series of snapshots imperfectly melded into one composition. That’s why we read them: They allow us to look at a topic from a variety of angles, […]

LambBonnie Nadzam275 pages, softcover: $15.95.Other Press, 2011. After his marriage dissolves over an affair with a coworker and his father dies, David Lamb drives to a parking lot near his Chicago home to think. “Nothing before him but the filthy street and bright signs announcing the limits of his world: Transmission Masters and Drive Time […]

All Indians Do Not Live In Teepees (or Casinos)Catherine C. Robbins408 pages, softcover: $26.95.University of Nebraska Press, 2011. “This is a personal book,” Catherine C. Robbins writes in the preface to All Indians Do Not Live In Teepees (or Casinos), a collection of her journalistic essays. Robbins is not Indian, but she is also “not […]

Liberty LanesRobin Troy192 pages, softcover: $22.University of Nevada Press, 2011. Robin Troy’s second novel, Liberty Lanes, is a big-hearted story of ordinary people, their hopes, secrets and longings. It begins quietly in a bowling alley in a small Montana town, where Nelson Moore, a 74-year-old stalwart of the senior bowling league, waits for an early […]

The Little BrideAnna Solomon314 pages, softcover: $15. Riverhead, 2011. Anna Solomon’s fascinating first novel The Little Bride begins in Russia in the 1880s, when Minna Losk, a 16-year-old orphan, signs up to become a mail-order bride. After the death of her father, Minna worked for a while as a maid for a once-wealthy woman. Now, […]

Nothing Daunted: The Unexpected Education of Two Society Girls in the WestDorothy Wickenden304 pages, hardcover: $26.Scribner, 2011. “We did not want strays. We had serious matrimonial intentions, and we decided that young, pretty schoolteachers would be the best bet of all,” cowboy Ferry Carpenter recollected about his part in the effort to attract “schoolmarms” to […]

Lime CreekJoe Henry160 pages, hardcover: $20.Random House, 2011. Woody Creek, Colo.-based Joe Henry studied at the Iowa Writer’s Workshop with John Irving, but then detoured from writing fiction to work as a rancher, becoming a successful lyricist along the way. Henry’s ravishing first work of fiction, Lime Creek, must have been inspired by the Western […]

Open Spaces: Voices from the NorthwestPenny Harrison, ed. 252 pages, softcover: $22.50.University of Washington Press, 2011. I read Open Spaces: Voices from the Northwest over two weeks, setting it down still open so that its pages made a neat tent on my coffee table, returning to it over morning coffee, between garden chores, after dinner […]

New California Writing: 2011Gayle Wattawa, ed. 320 pages, softcover: $20.Heyday, 2011. Most anthologies possess a ready-made but sometimes narrow audience. Readers come to these single-subject, multi-authored books with an already established connection and desire to know more. What, then, does a book focused on California offer to those who live outside the Golden State? Plenty, […]

The Barbarian Nurseries: A NovelHéctor Tobar422 pages, hardcover: $27.Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011. Los Angeles Times columnist Héctor Tobar’s ferocious new novel, The Barbarian Nurseries, deftly and convincingly plunges us into the heated national debate on undocumented immigration. Araceli Ramirez, a single woman from Mexico City, works as the live-in housekeeper for Maureen Thompson and […]

Doc Mary Doria Russell 394 pages, hardcover: $26. Random House, 2011. Versatile novelist Mary Doria Rusell’s captivating reimagining of the life of Doc Holliday ends before the 1881 gunfight at the O.K. Corral, that eternal wellspring for Western novels and movies. In her new book, Doc, Russell sees Holliday as more than a gambler and […]