Boulder News

Western Book Roundup

‘Mustang’ in Film and Song and Colorado Book Award Finalists Announced

By Jenny Shank, 4-27-11

Deanne Stillman‘s Mustang continues to find new audiences off the page. According to Hollywood Reporter, actress Wendie Malick will star as Velma Johnston in the movie “Wild Horse Annie,” in development for summer 2012 for the Hallmark Channel. Kimberly Nordyke writes:

“The movie is being adapted from a portion of Deanne Stillman’s epic book Mustang: The Saga of the Wild Horse in the American West. It centers on the late Velma Johnston, a leading animal rights activist who campaigned to protect America’s wild horses. Her quest culminated in the U.S. Congress’ passing the Wild Free Roaming Horse and Burro Act of 1971.”

A few years ago, New West excerpted Stillman’s chapter about Comanche from Mustang. That chapter recently inspired the alt-country duo Granville to write the song “Blood and Gold,” which appears on their new album, and can be heard on this YouTube video.

• A new story by Thomas McGuane, “The Good Samaritan,” appears in the April 25 issue of The New Yorker. McGuane discussed the story with the magazine’s fiction editor, Deborah Treisman. One of the insights: McGuane explains why he enjoys the physical work of ranching along with writing: “I like having a physical and factual basis in a life other than the one found in books; not everything a writer needs can be found on Google or in Lonely Planet. Wallace Stevens, a proponent of full contact with reality, seems to have been unharmed by the insurance industry.”

• Boulder writer Florence Williams was a finalist for the $30,000 J. Anthony Lukas Work-in-Progress Award, sponsored by Harvard’s Nieman Foundation for Journalism, for her forthcoming book Breasts: A Natural and Unnatural History, to be published by Norton. Although the winner was Alex Tizon for Big Little Man: The Asian Male at the Dawn of the Asian Century, being named a finalist is a big honor for Williams and her book will be one to watch.

• The Colorado Center for the Book recently announced the finalists for the 2011 Colorado Book Awards—they haven’t the list on their website yet, but you can find the names of the finalists on their Facebook page.  Some of the highlights: The finalists for General Nonfiction are The Heroine’s Bookshelf: Life Lessons, From Jane Austen to Laura Ingalls Wilder by Erin Blakemore, Shinin’ Times and the Fort by Holly Arnold Kinney, edited by Mary Goodbody, Photography by Lois Ellen Frank, and Blue Lines: A Fishing Life by Tom Reed. The three finalists in the Literary Fiction category are Postcards from a Dead Girl by Kirk Farber, My Sisters Made of Light by Jacqueline St. Joan, and Fast Forward: The Mix Tape, edited by Nancy Stohlman.

• The winners of the Oregon Book Awards were announced Monday. Willy Vlautin won two awards for his novel Lean on Pete, the Ken Kesey Award for Fiction and the Readers’ Choice Award. Readers voted online for the winner of this prize. Jeff Baker of The Oregonian has the rundown of the rest of the winners here. Baker notes, “Vlautin, also the lead singer for Richmond Fontaine, often writes at the track in North Portland.”

• The April 21 issue of Westword has an in-depth cover feature on scholar and author Adam Bradley (“Word”), a professor at the University of Colorado in Boulder. Joel Warner discusses Bradley’s difficult upbringing in Utah, and how his interest in the writing of Ralph Ellison led to his becoming involved in editing Ellison’s never-finished second novel, which was published as Three Days Before the Shooting…, in 2010. Bradley then published his groundbreaking book The Anthology of Rap, and Warner details the controversy over it--one critic in particular drew attention to what he considered to be mistakes in the transcription of several songs’ lyrics. Bradley has landed on his feet, however, preparing to issue a revised paperback edition of that book and collaborating with the rapper Common on his autobiograpy.

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