Books

West of HereJonathan Evison496 pages, hardcover: $24.95.Algonquin Books, 2011. Once home to the Siwash and Klallam tribes, then to frontiersmen and a Utopian community, the fictional town of Port Bonita, Wash., provides a fertile backdrop for Jonathan Evison’s second novel, West of Here. Alternating between the late 19th century and the year 2006, Evison reveals […]

WreckerSummer Wood304 pages, hardcover: $20.Bloomsbury USA, 2011. In her second novel, Wrecker, New Mexico author Summer Wood draws on her personal experience as a foster parent. Wrecker is a bruiser of a boy who “seemed to need to feel his body collide with the physical world to know he existed.” He’s born and mostly raised […]

The RingerJenny Shank 304 pages, hardcover: $28.The Permanent Press, 2011. The slaying of a Mexican-American immigrant triggers parallel experiences of personal anguish, family discord and cultural dissonance, seen alternately through the eyes of the dead man’s widow and the cop who shot him. “His thoughts were a confusing jumble of elation, dread, relief and fear,” […]

Wild Comfort: The Solace of NatureKathleen Dean Moore256 pages,softcover: $15.95.Trumpeter Books, 2010. Writer, editor and activist Kathleen Dean Moore was settling in to write her next book when a series of personal tragedies changed everything. After several people close to her died within a few months, Moore abandoned her plans to create a book about […]

Volt: StoriesAlan Heathcock208 pages, softcover: $15.Graywolf Press, 2011. A good story has the power to divert us from our struggles as well as to help us understand them. This is one reason people turn to fiction, and it explains why Alan Heathcock’s debut short-story collection, Volt, is an ideal book for our times. Characters face […]

Southern Paiute: A PortraitWilliam Logan Hebner and Michael L. Plyler208 pages, hardcover: $34.95.Utah State University Press, 2010. In all of Native America, few people have been less understood or more maligned than the Southern Paiute Indians and their desert cousins. Mark Twain denounced them as “inferior to even the despised digger Indians of California.” Except […]

Friendly Fallout 1953Ann Ronald248 pages, hardcover: $24.95.University of Nevada Press, 2010.Friendly Fallout 1953, Nevada writer Ann Ronald’s latest exploration of place, is itself an experiment in fission — the literary kind. Set at Nevada’s Proving Ground, the book splits the telling of history among 12 fictional characters — plus Ronald herself — who witness the […]

When the Killing’s DoneT.C. Boyle384 pages, hardcover: $ 26.95.Viking, 2011. One of the West’s most prolific and trenchant novelists returns to a theme he previously explored in Tooth and Claw and A Friend of the Earth: our interactions with nature and their repercussions. T.C. Boyle’s characters often root for the environment. The tension and narrative […]

Where the Crooked River Rises: A High Desert HomeEllen Waterston144 pages, softcover: $18.95.Oregon State University Press, 2010. In 1973, Ellen Waterston, a New England transplant, and her husband drove into the high desert of eastern Oregon. “In our rundown pickup with Montana plates and a cab-over camper we looked more like evacuees from the Dust […]

Blind Your PoniesStanley Gordon West400 pages, softcover: $14.95.Algonquin Books, 2011. Willow Creek, the Montana town at the heart of Stanley Gordon West’s new novel, Blind Your Ponies, is home to the Broncos, a high school basketball team on a losing streak. It’s also a way station for adults escaping their pasts, and the basketball team’s […]

The Book of JohnKate Niles225 pages, softcover: $22.85.O Books, 2010. John Gregory Wayne Thompson, the eponymous hero of Kate Niles’ second novel, The Book of John, moves between the southwest Colorado desert and the cold beaches of Washington’s Neah Bay, in the process retracing his personal life and loves. An archaeologist, John is 50 years […]

Breaking into the BackcountrySteve Edwards192 pages, softcover: $16.95.University of Nebraska Press, 2010. “In the seven months I spent in the backcountry, in relative solitude, I rarely felt as alone as I do sitting at this table,” writes Steve Edwards, describing his return to the family dining room after a lengthy sojourn by Oregon’s Rogue River. […]

The Long Slide Blair Oliver and Peter Soliunas 200 pages, softcover: $20. World Audience, Inc., 2010. The first collaboration from authors Peter Soliunas and Blair Oliver, The Long Slide is at once a pulpy romp across the Rockies and a mash note to the works of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler. But where those authors […]

Matter Journal 13: Edward AbbeyVarious contributors432 pages, softcover: $17.Wolverine Farm Publishing, 2010. The problem with dead authors is that no more work will be forthcoming from them. Without new material to sink their teeth into, both fans and critics of Edward Abbey have long resorted to “secondary sources” — interviews with the curmudgeon’s friends, vintage […]

Raw Edges: A MemoirPhyllis Barber280 pages, hardcover: $26.95.University of Nevada Press, 2010. All memoirs risk provoking the reader’s question: What’s so important about your life, anyway? Why should we bother to read a whole book about it? Nevada author Phyllis Barber tries to answer that question in her second autobiography, Raw Edges: “While this search […]