Bozeman News

Western Book Roundup

2011 Western Book Preview

By Jenny Shank, 1-12-11

In this week’s Roundup I’ll take a look at some books of special interest to Western readers that will be published this year:

January

• Kings of Colorado, the debut novel by Austin’s David E. Hilton is out this week.  To learn more about it, check out my interview with him or the review I wrote for the Dallas Morning News.

• Annie Proulx’s new memoir Bird Cloud is now in stores—it has been getting a strange mix of glowing and/or disapproving reviews.  Among the people who loved it are Tim Gautreaux, who covered it for the San Francisco Chronicle, and Donna Seaman, who gave it a starred review for Booklist.  Not as enamored were Alexandra Fuller and Dwight Garner, who both wrote about it for the New York Times—Garner’s review is really funny.

• Billings-based writer Craig Lancaster, whose first book was named a 2009 Montana Honor Book, will publish his second novel this month. The Summer Son is due out January 25 (AmazonEncore, $13.95).  According to the book jacket: “When Mitch Quillen’s life begins to unravel, he fears there is no escape. His marriage and his career are both failing, and his relationship with his father has been a disaster for decades. Approaching forty, Mitch doesn’t want to become a middle-aged statistic. When his estranged father, Jim, suddenly calls, Mitch’s wife urges him to respond. Ready for a change, Mitch heads to Montana and a showdown that will alter the course of his life.”

• For a completely different view of the West, check out Rick Lax‘s Fool Me Once: Hustlers, Hookers, Headliners, and How Not to Get Screwed in Vegas (St. Martin’s Press, $14.99).  Kirkus Reviews wrote, “Fear and loathing is in short supply, but there are plenty of cons and cheap hustles in this lively memoir of time spent on the seamier edge of Casinoland.”

February

• Jonathan Evison‘s West of Here (Algonquin, $24.95), set in Washington state, is due out February 15.  Dan Chaon called it “a novel of stunning sweep” and Publishers Weekly gave it a starred review: “A century after the late–19th-century settlers of Olympic Peninsula to the west of Seattle set out to build a dam, their descendants want to demolish it to bring back fish runs, providing one of the many plots in this satisfyingly meaty work from Evison.” Evison will be visiting many bookstores in the region, including the Tattered Cover (Feb. 28), Boulder Book Store (March 1), King’s English (March 3), and many other places in Washington, California, and Oregon.  Plus the book has a really cool website.

March

• Graywolf Press will publish the debut short story collection by Boise’s Alan Heathcock on March 1.  Heathcock teaches writing at Boise State University, has won a National Magazine Award in fiction, and his book is already raking in the accolades.  Publishers Weekly gave it a starred review, writing, “Heathcock’s impressive debut collection pursues modern American prairie characters through some serious Old Testament muck. If it’s not flood or fire ravishing the village of Krafton, then it’s fratricide, pedocide, or just plain ol’ stranger killing.”

• Wyoming author C.J. Box‘s new Joe Pickett mystery, Cold Wind (Putnam, $25.95), hits stores March 22.  Here’s the book jacket teaser: “When Earl Alden is found dead, dangling from a wind turbine, it’s his wife, Missy, who is arrested.  Unfortunately for Joe Pickett, Missy is his mother-in-law, a woman he dislikes heartily, and now he doesn’t know what to do—especially when early signs point to her being guilty as sin.”

• I’m not going to lie to you.  The novel I’m most excited to see coming out this year is my own. The Ringer--set in mainly in Denver, with forays to Ft. Collins, Moab, Utah and Las Cruces, New Mexico--is due out March 1 (Permanent Press, $28).  I worked on it on and off for eight years.  Many of us had our doubts about whether it would ever see the light of day.  A few months ago my dad asked me, “At what point is this thing past the point of no return, where the publisher has already put so much time and money into it that they won’t decide not to print it?” Thanks, Dad.  That time is now.  I think.  So far The Ringer has received great reviews from Publishers Weekly and Kirkus Reviews, who wrote, “Shank’s first at-bat as a novelist is a hit.”

I’ll be participating in the Lighthouse Writers Buzz “The Story of a Book” panel with Harrison Fletcher, Eleanor Brown, and Jackie St. John in Denver on February 19 at 910 Arts (910 Santa Fe Blvd., 7 p.m.), reading at the Tattered Cover in Denver in early April, at the Boulder Book Store on April 27, and after that I’m hoping to make my way up to Missoula.

April

• April brings Fire Season: Field Notes From A Wilderness Lookout (Ecco, $24.99) by Philip Connors, who for more than a decade, according to the book jacket, “has spent half of each year in a 7’ X 7’ fire lookout tower, ten thousand feet up in a remote corner of New Mexico.” Excerpts from the book have been published in such swell places as The Paris Review and Harper’s.

May

• Jonathan Evison wrote on the blog Three Guys One Book that one book he’s looking forward to this year is Patrick deWitt‘s The Sisters Brothers (Ecco $24.99), which Library Journal described as “both homage to the classic Western and knife thrust to its dark underbelly, this novel has a quirky, deadpan exterior and a hard-beating heart; we come to see how men die and how the brotherly bond shifts but holds.” DeWitt lives in Oregon.

• The Descent of Man (Unbridled Books, $24.95) the debut novel by Oregon’s Kevin Dessinger, will be published in May.  The book jacket teaser: “One night Jim, a quiet wine steward, wakes to find two men trying to steal his car. Against the petitions of his wife, he goes outside to get the plate number of the thieves’ truck. Instead, something comes over him and he drives away in their truck until he recovers his wits and realizes what he’s done.  When Jim learns that the two would-be thieves are brothers with a history of violence, he soon finds himself over his head in a mire of sinister events and must risk everything to regain what he can of his life before that night.”

• I have been enjoying Daniel Orozco‘s stories for years, in places such as Best American Short Stories, Story, McSweeney’s, and Zoetrope.  At last, they will be collected in Orientation And Other Stories (Faber & Faber, $23), due out May 23.  Orozco teaches creative writing at the University of Idaho.

June

• Graywolf Press will publish In This Light: New & Selected Stories by Melanie Rae Thon in June.  Montana native Thon teaches at the University of Utah, and her fiction has won many awards, including two NEA fellowships, and a Whiting Writers’ Award.  Her stories have appeared in Best American Short Stories, O. Henry Award and Pushcart Prize volumes.  So you know, she’s no slouch.

July

• Shann Ray‘s Bakeless Prize winning short story collection, American Masculine: Montana Stories (Graywolf Press, $15), will hit bookstores in July.  Robert Boswell wrote, “The sentences in this book have such grace and muscularity that they seem more performed than written, and the author’s images and events carry the nearly visceral weight of memory…American Masculine is a powerful, resonant work of literature, and Shann Ray is a masterful and original writer.” Well, I guess he liked it.  Plus, the cover is awesome: a pair of buffaloes smashing skulls amidst an explosion of red and blue stars and stripes.

Look for my reviews of many of these books in the coming months.  You know what annoys me about my own list?  Out of the fourteen I mentioned, there are only three books by women on it and I had to throw myself in there to get the number that high.  I’ve noticed a dearth of Western books published by women in recent months.  Sistahs, speak up.  Let me know if you’ve written a book with a Western setting that will be published this year. 

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