Books

“Indians must either fall in with the march of civilization and progress,” wrote Major James McLaughlin, military director of the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation, in 1889, “or be crushed by the passage of the multitude.” More than a century later, three writers uncomfortably assess that prediction, and find that Native Americans have indeed fallen into […]

The New West is one of the easiest default settings for contemporary American fiction. Start with a dissolute or desperate main character and throw him down in an urbanized, or, better still, suburbanized landscape. Add a little Western scenery – mountains and rivers, just out of reach – but focus on the housing developments and […]

Can you recall that time in your life when you first encountered the world on your own, when your eagerness fought with your shyness, and friends and books and music and movies seemed vital sources not just of amusement but of new, remarkable, and attainable lives? If you can’t, The Empanada Brotherhood, the 11th novel […]

One of the most beautiful books of 2007, The Walk, by William deBuys, tells of life, death, crisis and love in northern New Mexico.  It’s a poetic book, to be sure, but one that’s entirely down-to-earth. Sometimes, when writers recount their experiences farming or working the land, it’s hard not to see them as dilettantes, […]

In 1966, a severely asthmatic child named Gregg Mitman was one of an estimated 12.6 million allergy sufferers in the United States. Today, allergic asthma and hay fever affect more than 50 million Americans – roughly 20 percent of the population. In Breathing Space, Mitman, now a medical historian, traces the causes and effects of […]

Chez Panisse is a French restaurant in an old home in Berkeley, Calif. Its menu is set, like that of a dinner party, and changes every night. Whether or not you’ve eaten there, you’ve felt its influence, which has rippled through the West and the world over the past 37 years.  The organic craze and […]

Flamenco, says a character in Sarah Bird’s dramatic and well-written novel, The Flamenco Academy, is an “obsessive-compulsive disorder set to a great beat.” The novel weaves the history of flamenco with the search for identity and the power of obsession.  Albuquerque high-school seniors Rae and Didi make an unlikely duo. Rae, the narrator, is a […]

We’ve pored over the latest from publishers and picked out a selection of books – by Western authors and/or on Western subjects – that we’d like to curl up with this fall. All have recently been released, or will be in the next few months; we’ve listed them here alphabetically by categories, according to the […]

Think you know your Western literature? Answer 15 or more correctly and count yourself among the true Western literati. 1) Where were David Brower, Charles Park and John McPhee camping in the first section of Encounters with the Archdruid? 2) Which fictional fishing village in Washington was the site of Kabuo Miyamoto’s trial for allegedly […]

William Kittredge is a man peculiarly suited to write about the West. He comes from a family that used the land as Westerners did long ago, before everything began to run out. The son of a rancher in southeastern Oregon, Kittredge grew into his father’s job, tried to manage the land and the men, and […]

The paperback Western rides on