Missoula News

Western Book Roundup

“Weird Sisters” Makes a Splash and The Country Bookshelf Changes Hands

By Jenny Shank, 1-26-11

The Weird Sisters (Amy Einhorn Books, 318 pp., $24.95), the debut novel by Denver-based writer Eleanor Brown, is earning lots of national praise. USA Today featured it in a recent “New Voices” column, describing the plot in this way: “Three seemingly incompatible sisters, whose father is a Shakespeare scholar, return home to help their mother deal with breast cancer.”

Barnes & Noble picked it for their Discover Great New Writers Program, Amazon.com featured it in their “Best of the Month” list, Cathy Langer, head buyer for Denver’s Tattered Cover, talked it up, Entertainment Weekly and People Magazine praised it, and Janet Maslin wrote for the New York Times, “Eleanor Brown’s debut novel begins charmingly, narrated by three sisters who speak as a single entity.” And The Weird Sisters has just been out for a week.

Brown is touring other parts of the country currently, but she’ll be back in Denver to discuss her novel at the Lighthouse Writers Workshop “Story of a Book” event on February 19 (910 Arts, Denver, 7p.m.).  I hope to interview her for New West soon.

• The entertaining Denver writer Cortright McMeel, who I interviewed recently about his debut novel Short, has a new blog called Bibliomaniac that is worth your time.  Check out his essay “The Best Five Westerns You’ve Never Read,” in which he praises Warlock by Oakley Hall, Butcher’s Crossing by John Williams, Tombstone by Walter Noble Burns, The Drop Edge of Yonder by Rudolph Wurlitzer and Roughing It by Mark Twain. (Via The Lighthouse Writers Top Secret Blog.)

• Gail Schontzler wrote for the Bozeman Daily Chronicle about Mary Jane DiSanti’s recent sale of the Country Bookshelf to Ariana Paliobagis.  DiSanti had run the Country Bookshelf for 36 years.  DiSanti told the Chronicle: “I’m so excited.  There’s not a person in the world who would do a better job. She’s going to keep it the same and make it better. She has exciting new ideas and energy, so much energy.” (Via Shelf Awareness.)

• I reviewed Annie Proulx’s Bird Cloud for the Dallas Morning News. I enjoyed the insights the memoir offered into her fiction writing mind.  Here’s one thing I learned:

“Although Proulx’s sympathies in her fiction usually lie with Wyoming natives like the James gang, we learn that Proulx, in her quest for the perfect Japanese soak tub, solar panels and Brazilian floor tiles, might be more like the outsiders she poked fun at in her story ‘Man Crawling Out of Trees,’ in which a New York couple buys a home in Wyoming, one of the many pine-log ‘estates’ that resulted when ranch widows ‘dumped the cows and called up the real estate brokers, who sketched out thirty-five-acre ranchettes.’ They proceed to lavishly outfit their new home, as does Proulx.”

Proulx isn’t doing an extensive book tour, but she will discuss Bird Cloud at the Dallas Museum of Art on January 28 at 7:30 p.m.

Annie Proulx will appear 7:30 p.m. Friday at the Dallas Museum of Art, as part of Arts & Letters Live. Tickets $37, with discounts for seniors and students at

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