I am a son of the contemporary American West—born near the Pacific Coast, raised in Texas, and an inveterate traveler of its byways and odd corners. Through the duality of my upbringing, as the son of a well-traveled mother, a suburban sportswriter stepfather, and a father who worked in extractive industries, I’ve seen up close both harmony and dissonance. The work I’m drawn to, whether on the creation end or the consumptive end, goes deep into the lives that play out in these places.
Allen Morris Jones writes with such grace, humility, and empathy that I just knew, from the earliest paragraphs, that I’d follow him wherever he wanted to go with this one.
I like stories, whether on the page, on film, or in the oral tradition, in which the answers aren’t easy, and Jones obliges. This story of a hardscrabble Montana poet who witnessed something horrible as a child and searches for a way to live with it as an adult moved me in a deep and still way.
It’s one of those books I finished, set quietly down, and thought about for days afterward. The thinking about it persists years later.
Eli Singer, a rancher and poet in remote Eastern Montana, sees his life upended when a long-buried corpsewhich turns out to be a murder victim from Eli's childhooderodes out of a hillside on his property. This discovery forces Eli to turn inward to revisit the tragic events in his past that led to a life-changing moment of violence, while at the same time he must reach outside himself toward Chloe, a literary agent from New York whom he is falling in love with. In the tradition of such classic western writers as Thomas McGuane, James Lee Burke, Ivan Doig and…
Sometimes the compelling central character of a book is the author. So it is with this one, by the current poet laureate of Montana. Page after page, I was mesmerized by what La Tray could weave out of a single, seemingly simple thought that, it turned out, contained galaxies of complexity and nuance.
I think La Tray is a true original in Western letters, a man of deep conviction, conscience, humor, righteousness, and love. His talents are on full display here.
"La Tray is a perimeter man, seeing the reality in wildness yet dealing the best he can at
rec onciling truth in nature." - Barry Babcock author of Teachers in the Forest
This book is a collection of poems and essays from the writer's experiences of travelling through landscapes both wild and civilized. They speak with delicate simplicities ranging from the death of a favorite pickup truck, to the joy of hitting the trail with a four-legged companion. There are…
I think it’s easy to live on the fault lines of conflict in the West today and be judgmental about who’s right and who’s wrong. What I love about Elise Atchison’s debut novel is that she avoids those binaries and instead tells the story of a changing Western town through the lens of the land, which bears the transformations—for good or for ill—but also has its own say.
I think Atchison smartly, instinctively employs an excellent piece of writing advice: A good antagonist thinks he/she is the protagonist.
Here, I veer off into nonfiction, but only because nobody would believe any novelist who conjured up the likes of the real-life people Betsy Gaines Quammen talks to in constructing this portrait of how things got so fraught out West.
In my view, it takes a writer of particular skill and empathy to honestly get at the thoughts and motivations of folks with whom she likely disagrees on fundamental questions. Further, it takes a writer of inherent fairness to call balls and strikes on all sides of contentious issues. Quammen, for my money, is such a writer.
“True West disentangles reality from centuries of myth and mystique."
—HAMPTON SIDES, New York Times bestselling author of Blood and Thunder
From the Northern Rockies to the Southwest deserts, Betsy Gaines Quammen explores how myths shape our identities, heighten polarizations, and fracture our shared understanding of the world around us. As she investigates the origins and effects of myths of the American West, Gaines Quammen travels through small towns and big cities, engaging people and building relationships at every stop. Misperceptions about land, politics, liberty, and self-determination threaten the well-being of people and communities across the country, and Gaines Quammen…
I was utterly awed by Kase Johnstun’s boundless love for the characters in this novel, which I learned later was informed by memories of and letters by his grandparents.
It overflows with some of my favorite things about the literature that most often resonates with me: When an author of great skill can mine memory and history, spend time with it, apply the transformative agent of imagination, and emerge into the world with work laden with genuineness.
I find Johnstun’s work to be imbued with love, which he marries to considerable storytelling chops. He’s a writer more people should know about, so it’s become a bit of a mission of mine to shout his name.
"Beautiful and expansive…in Johnstun's Let the Wild Grasses Grow, Colorado has a successor to Kent Haruf." —SEAN PRENTISS, author of Finding Abbey
Let the Wild Grasses Grow chronicles the lives of Della Chavez and John Cordova, childhood friends separated by a tragic accident, who find each other again during World War II after leading separate lives of struggle through the Great Depression, the Dust Bowl, and, for John, abuse at the hands of his grandfather. This sweeping American love story celebrates the power of home landscapes, family heritage, and first love.
This book follows a traveling pipeline inspector who has lost the thread of his life.
Max Wendt's work has taken him away from his wife and his grown daughter and put him on a path toward ruin that he doesn't even realize he's traveling. In the course of an extraordinary month-plus, he loses almost everything—and gains friendships and perspective that might just sustain him as he tries to recover from his self-inflicted losses.
Willem and Jurriaan have a miserable childhood thanks to their cruel, controlling mother—Louisa Veldkamp, a world-renowned pianist. Dad turns a blind eye. One day, Louisa vanishes without a trace during a family vacation.
Adoptee Anneliese Bakker survives a toxic childhood and leaves home, vowing never to return. While searching for her biological mother, she meets the adult Willem, and they fall in love. Pregnant and engaged, she moves into the family mansion, wanting nothing more than to create a loving family for her child. But the Veldkamps are cold and distant. And why is Louisa a taboo subject?
An expectant mother gets more than she bargained for when she marries into a seemingly perfect family in this gripping debut novel–a must read for fans of A. J. Finn and B. A. Paris.
After surviving a nightmarish childhood, Anneliese Bakker is on the mend and searching for her birth mother. But when she meets Willem, she falls madly in love and finally finds a safe place to land. Engaged and expecting her first child, she moves into the Veldkamp mansion on a stately, tree-lined avenue in Amsterdam. And yet, nothing about Willem’s family is as it seems. Instead of…
