With some of the West’s most insightful authors as our guides, each fall we briefly set aside the news to create a special books/essays issue and take a more reflective look at our region. This year’s books/essays issue explores ways of looking at a landscape and locating ourselves within it.
Ruth Kirk, pioneering guidebook author
A natural and human histories expert of the West reflects on her work.
Marginalia: an essay
On a trek across the Arctic, a writer’s map becomes a record of the journey.
A California essayist on American optimism and how landscape shapes our imaginations
An interview with Richard Rodriguez.
Reconciling family narrative with textbook history in Montana’s Bighorn Valley
An essay by Joe Wilkins.
Colorado Poet Laureate David Mason’s four-year road trip
Bringing poetry to an entire state, one county at a time.
The renegade cartographer
Dave Imus challenges the murkiness of modern mapmaking.
Reconstructing a volatile past
Son of a Gun: A Memoir Justin St. Germain 256 pages, hardcover: $26. Random House, 2013. Murdered in her trailer just days after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, sensationalized on TV news, labeled a “black widow” by a marshal — Justin St. Germain’s mother was judged for her lifestyle both in life and in death.…
See you in October
As we do four times a year, High Country News is skipping an issue. We’ll be back in your mailbox around Oct. 14. In the meantime, keep up with us at hcn.org, and eat as many homegrown tomatoes as you can; they won’t last forever. Summer visitors Longtime subscriber Brian Jatlin came by our Paonia,…
The reading season
After the summer’s whirl of activity, after the mountains have been hiked and the rivers have been run and the garden has been weeded for what we hope to God is the final round, it’s a good time to kick back with a book. Fall invites a slower pace, gives us lazy afternoons by the…
The ‘wrong kind of Indians’
Cowboys and East IndiansNina McConigley195 pages, softcover: $15.95.FiveChapters Books, 2013. In her captivating debut story collection, Casper-raised author Nina McConigley examines with wit and empathy what it means to be “the wrong kind of Indians living in Wyoming.” Although prejudice and ignorance surface, there are few bad guys in this game of cowboys and Indians,…
What do you know?
Author Percival Everett defies categories and generalizations.
A puzzle of memory and vision
Boneland: Linked StoriesNance Van Winckel196 pages, softcover: $16.95.University of Oklahoma Press, 2013. Loss — real and potential — casts a shadow over the lives of the characters in Washington writer Nance Van Winckel’s poignant, deeply interconnected short stories. At the center of the collection is Lynette, who seems as trouble-prone as she is resilient. In…
Desert solitude, desert community
Brother and the DancerKeenan Norris266 pages, softcover:$15.Heyday Books, 2013. Gang wars, drive-by shootings, drug sales, poverty — San Bernardino County was, as Keenan Norris explains in his debut novel, Brother and the Dancer, “one of the most violent places in America” at the millennium. The area surrounding his hometown of Highland, Calif., he notes ruefully,…
Heart-Shaped River: Craig Childs finds his center in Canyonlands
“Not all maps are made of paper. The best ones are spooled in memory.”
Craig Childs narrates a Canyonlands adventure
Images from a month-long trip with friends in 1999.
Learning to bend: Settling Utah’s road wars
Roads in the Wilderness: Conflict in Canyon CountryJedediah S. Rogers242 pages, hardcover: $39.95.University of Utah Press, 2013. Some fear that we will saddle our children with trillions of dollars in federal debt. That would be too bad, but it would be a minor inconvenience compared to what our forefathers cursed us with: the 1866 federal…
Mapping our place in the West
I’m a Coloradan because of a map. Six years before I was born, my newly married parents, seeking to leave cloudy Tacoma, Wash., for a bigger, sunnier city, spread out a Rand McNally map of the West. Phoenix was too hot; L.A. seemed alluring but unreal, a land of movie stars and palm trees. Drawn…
Mountain goats, cats, glampers — that’s short for glamorous campers — and more
What have you heard?