Books

AssumptionPercival Everett272 pages, softcover: $15.Graywolf Press, October. There aren’t nearly enough books set in New Mexico. With its cinematic lighting and uniquely off-kilter characters, the state should grow great novels as plentifully as chiles. Strangely, though, it hasn’t. California author Percival Everett sets out to change that with Assumption, a trilogy of mysteries starring Ogden […]

The changes seem to happen overnight: Even under the stifling lid of late-summer days, September’s dusk begins to come on cool, its mornings curling at the edges with damp chill like the pages of a book. Along the ditches and river, the cottonwood leaves are first to drop, scattering the ground with gold. Tea becomes […]

Finding Everett Ruess: The Life and Unsolved Disappearance of a Legendary Wilderness ExplorerDavid Roberts416 pages, hardcover: $25.Broadway, 2011. Everett Ruess: His Short Life, Mysterious Death, and Astonishing AfterlifePhilip L. Fradkin296 pages, hardcover: $24.95.University of California Press, 2011. There’s nothing like an unsolved disappearance to create an enduring cult hero. Maybe that’s why Amelia Earhart and […]

What You See in the Dark: A NovelManuel Muñoz272 pages, hardcover: $23.95.Algonquin Books, 2011. It’s 1959, and the shiny façade of America’s white culture is beginning to tarnish. Schools are being desegregated and black people are starting to march in the streets of the South. There’s an “unsavory mixing of whites and Mexicans” in California […]

The Color of Night Madison Smartt Bell 208 pages, softcover: $15.Vintage Contemporaries, 2011. Dangerous, charismatic leaders with zealous followers haunt Western history, with Jim Jones, the California cult leader responsible for the 1978 Guyana suicides, at the top of the list. In The Color of Night, Madison Smartt Bell’s 13th novel, the leader is clearly […]

Wolfer: A MemoirCarter Niemeyer374 pages, softcover: $17.99.BottleFly Press, 2010. Former federal trapper and shooter Carter Niemeyer, the author of the memoir Wolfer, seems an unlikely advocate for wolves and other predators. A “wolfer,” after all, is a person who kills wolves, a job with its genesis in the great wildlife extermination campaigns that are as […]

Buried by the RoanMark Stevens346 pages, softcover: $14.95.People’s Press, 2011. In his second mystery novel, Buried by the Roan, Colorado writer Mark Stevens tells a “ripped from the headlines” story involving natural gas drilling and hydraulic fracturing, or fracking. The story is set in and around the Roan Plateau area between Glenwood Springs and Meeker, […]

Western Heritage: A Selection of Wrangler Award-Winning ArticlesEdited by Paul Andrew Hutton305 pages, softcover: $19.95.University of Oklahoma Press, 2011. Geronimo, Crazy Horse and the Texas Rangers all have dramatic cameos in Western Heritage, Paul Andrew Hutton’s anthology of award-winning essays. Since 1961, Oklahoma City’s National Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum has given its annual Wrangler […]

The Book of Want: A NovelDaniel A. Olivas144 pages, softcover: $16.95.University of Arizona Press, 2011. “I want … I want everything. Everything that makes life beautiful.” So says Conchita, one of the many characters in Los Angeles writer Daniel Olivas’ The Book of Want. That Conchita is a voluptuous, amorous, unmarried 62-year-old with a penchant […]

Llano Estacado: An Island in the SkyEdited by Stephen Bogener and William Tydeman192 pages, hardcover: $45. Texas Tech University Press, 2011. The Llano Estacado is a featureless plain, punctuated by canyons, that covers much of west Texas and eastern New Mexico. In the early 19th century, this sea of grass supported millions of bison, and […]

Permanent Vacation: Twenty Writers on Work and Life in Our National Parks Volume 1: The WestEdited by Kim Wyatt and Erin Bechtol 205 pages, softcover: $15.Bona Fide Books, 2011. In Permanent Vacation, editors Kim Wyatt and Erin Bechtol have assembled an eclectic collection of essays by cooks, river guides, maids, backcountry rangers and horse wranglers […]

American Masculine: StoriesShann Ray192 pages, softcover: $15.Graywolf Press, 2011. American Masculine has already won a major literary award, the 2010 Bakeless Prize for fiction, sponsored by the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. Author Shann Ray is a professor at Washington’s Gonzaga University who specializes in leadership and forgiveness studies. He musters these 10 stories from the […]

Infinite City: A San Francisco Atlas Rebecca Solnit167 pages, softcover: $24.95.University of California Press, 2010. San Francisco author Rebecca Solnit’s latest release, Infinite City, can be loosely described as an atlas of her hometown. But Solnit is interested in far more than geographical representation, as she writes in the book’s foreword: “An atlas is a […]

Navajos Wear Nikes: A Reservation LifeJim Kristofic256 pages, hardcover: $26.95. University of New Mexico Press, 2011. Despite his light-brown curls and pale face, Jim Kristofic gets asked this question all the time, even though he no longer lives on the Navajo Reservation. Now 29 and back in his native Pennsylvania, he teaches and tells stories […]

In This Light: New and Selected StoriesMelanie Rae Thon256 pages, softcover: $15.Graywolf Press, 2011. Utah author Melanie Rae Thon maintains a seat beside fellow literary powerhouses Annie Proulx and Maile Meloy as she paints a portrait of a West that is at once desolate and tender. Written in fierce and unflinching prose, the stories in […]