A review of ‘Contenders,’ by Erika Krouse.
Jenny Shank
Posted inSeptember 14, 2015: Close Ties in Big Landscapes
Overlooked author Lucia Berlin gets brought back to the light
‘A Manual for Cleaning Women,’ her posthumous book of stories, reveals a formidable talent.
Posted inAugust 17, 2015: Little Big Bird
Tombstone’s true grit
Review of ‘Epitaph: A Novel of the O.K. Corral’ by Mary Doria Russell.
Posted inJune 22, 2015: Dust to Dust
Underdog roboticists
Review of ‘Spare Parts: Four Undocumented Teenagers, One Ugly Robot, and the Battle for the American Dream’ by Joshua Davis.
Posted inMay 25, 2015: Monument Man
A trapper’s tale
Review of ‘Into the Savage Country’ by Shannon Burke.
Posted inMay 11, 2015: The Wetland Wars
In pursuit of a ghost
Review of “The High Divide” by Lin Enger.
Posted inMarch 16, 2015: Wild Ride
Hollywood horse havoc
Review of “Falling from Horses” by Molly Gloss.
Posted inMarch 2, 2015: Unite and Conquer
Beauty and malevolence in Montana
Review of ‘The Ploughmen’ by Kim Zupan.
Posted inFebruary 2, 2015: This Land is Their Land
Love in a post-apocalyptic world
Review of “California” by Edan Lepucki.
Posted inNovember 24, 2014: Transportation Transformation
Social work blues
Review of ‘Fourth of July Creek’ by Smith Henderson.
Posted inOctober 27, 2014: Defuse the West
Nowhere left to run
Review of “Point of Direction” by Rachel Weaver
Posted inSeptember 15, 2014: Books & Essays
An author’s West of dreams and nightmares
Malcolm Brooks mingles romanticism with pragmatic realities.
Posted inSeptember 1, 2014: Lost in the Woods
Murder in Old San Francisco
Review of ‘Frog Music’ by Emma Donoghue
Posted inAugust 4, 2014: Idaho's Sewer System
The bomb builders’ wives
The Wives of Los AlamosTaraShea Nesbit233 pages, hardcover: $25.Bloomsbury, 2014. In her deft debut novel, Colorado writer TaraShea Nesbit imagines the lives of the wives of the men who were stationed in New Mexico’s Los Alamos National Laboratory, working on the Manhattan Project during World War II. Nesbit writes in the collective voice of the […]
Posted inApril 28, 2014: Two-Wheel Revolution
Shady dealings in the desert
SunlandDon Waters200 pages, hardcover:$25.95.University of Nevada Press, 2013. Sid Dulaney leaves his cheating girlfriend behind in Massachusetts and returns home to Tucson in Sunland, Oregon writer Don Waters’ hilarious first novel. Sid had worked as an itinerant teacher, but finds himself jobless in Tucson, where he spends his time looking after his beloved grandmother, Nana. […]
Posted inMarch 3, 2014: Fallon’s deadly legacy
Brutal frontier
The SonPhilipp Meyer592 pages, softcover: $16.99.Ecco, 2014. “The land was hard on its sons, harder yet on the sons of other lands,” writes Philipp Meyer in The Son, a masterful, gripping portrait of America’s Western expansion told through the lives of one Texas family. The Son braids together the stories of three members of the […]
Posted inFebruary 17, 2014: The Gila $olution
Montana escape
High and InsideRussell Rowland230 pages, softcover: $16.95Bangtail Press, 2013. Ex-Red Sox pitcher Pete Hurley comes to Bozeman to start a new life after a series of tragic mishaps that left him publicly shamed in Massachusetts. “Just as I was about to get over the incident that ended my baseball career,” he explains, “a drunken accident […]
Posted inFebruary 3, 2014: The Hanford Whistleblowers
Storm and stress on the frontier
Crossing PurgatoryGary Schanbacher292 pages, hardcover: $25.95.Pegasus Books, 2013. Thompson Grey abandons his Indiana farm in 1858 and joins a caravan of pioneers trekking west along the Santa Fe Trail in Gary Schanbacher’s accomplished new novel. Crossing Purgatory is a moral Western that questions what any decent human being owes another amid the harsh conditions of […]
Posted inOctober 14, 2013: The New Geronimo?
Is this heaven? No, it’s Idaho
Godforsaken Idaho: StoriesShawn Vestal,209 pages, softcover:$15.95.Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2013. Shawn Vestal sets the stories in his focused yet far-reaching debut collection among regular Mormon folks who live in Idaho, touching on their lives in the past, the present and even the afterworld. Most of his characters have fallen away from their faith or are struggling […]
Posted inSeptember 16, 2013: Intimate Geographies
A California essayist on American optimism and how landscape shapes our imaginations
An interview with Richard Rodriguez.