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Western Book Roundup

Whitefish Review Hosts a Ski Fundraiser and Boise’s Anthony Doerr is a Finalist For Big Story Prize

By Jenny Shank, 3-30-11

Anthony Doerr, short story champ, now known around this website as A-Dog.

Boise fiction-writing powerhouse Anthony Doerr just won the $20,000 Story Prize for his recent collection Memory Wall, and now he’s made the shortlist of six finalists for an award with a very long name: The Sunday Times EFG Private Bank Short Story Award. Why does it have such a long name? Because according to the press release, it’s “the world’s most valuable short story award” and the winner gets £30,000 so they can call it whatever they want. My handy pound-to-dollar converter tells me that’s $47,954--for one story! And you thought writing short stories was a career destined to result in penury. For chumps maybe, but not for A-Dog, which is the name I’ve just invented for Mr. Doerr. If he wins, he needs to get a necklace with a solid-gold £ symbol hanging from it. We’ll find out how Doerr’s story “The Deep” fared on April 8 when the winners are announced at the The Sunday Times Oxford Literary Festival.

•The Whitefish Review is holding the most creative and downright Western-y fundraiser for a literary magazine I’ve ever heard of. The Whitefish Review has teamed with Great Northern Brewing Company and Montana Ski Company to rent Turner Mountain (22 miles north of Libby, Mont.) on Thursday, March 31, from 9:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. The $40 admission will include a lift ticket, snacks, and demonstrations by Montana Ski Company. At the end of the day, there will be a celebration featuring beer, a bonfire “and an applewood-smoked pork shoulder barbecue by Andrew Dolan.” And after all that, everyone needs to go home and read a book, right? Tickets are available from the Whitefish Review website, the Great Northern Brewing Company, or at the ski area on the day of the event.

• Montana native Kim Barker’s first book, The Taliban Shuffle: Strange Days in Afghanistan and Pakistan is earning rave reviews, including one from Michiko Kakutani of the New York Times. Barker covered Afghanistan and Pakistan as the South Asia bureau chief for The Chicago Tribune from 2004 to 2009 and as a reporter for ProPublica. She’s turned her war zone experiences into a “funny book…that manages to be hilarious and harrowing, witty and illuminating, all at the same time,” Kakutani wrote. The Chicago Reader ran a fascinating profile of Barker, which quotes from a part of the book where Barker discusses the similarities between Montana and Afghanistan. Michael Miner writes:

“If Taliban Shuffle makes Afghanistan sound remotely like any place in America, it’s Montana, where Barker grew up—’where most people graduated high school and never left, where a meal of bull testicles passed for a culinary experience, where my parents scolded me for failing to take proper care of their marijuana plants.’ Afghanistan was ‘jagged blue-and-purple mountains, big skies, and bearded men in pickup trucks stocked with guns and hate for the government. It was just like Montana—just on different drugs.’”

• Craig Lancaster‘s first novel, 600 Hours of Edward, which was named a 2009 honor book by the Montana Book Award committee, has been selected for this year’s One Book Billings community read. Readers will gather to discuss the novel at various events during National Library Week, April 11 through 16, and Lancaster will give a presentation at Parmly Billings Library on April 16. (Look for New West’s review of Lancaster’s second novel, The Summer Son next week.)

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