New West Network

My Page: Jenny Shank

Western Book Roundup

The Denver Post reported this weekend that Denver writer Mark Obmascik‘s Halfway to Heaven: My White Knuckled and Knuckleheaded-Quest for the Rocky Mountain High won this year’s outdoor literature prize from the National Outdoor Book Awards Foundation: “The book is about climbing Colorado’s 14,000-plus foot mountains, all 54 of them, in one summer. The problem, though, as Obmascik points out in this humorous work, is that he’s completely out of shape.” Obmasik was the lead writer for the Denver Post team that won the 2000 Pulitzer Prize for its coverage of the Columbine shootings. He will discuss his book at the REI in Boulder on November 30 (7 p.m.).

• John Jurgensen’s insightful interview with Cormac McCarthy ran in the Wall Street Journal last week in advance of the opening of the film version of The Road.  Their discussion ranges all over the place in subject matter, from the movie versions of McCarthy’s films, to fatherhood, to his writing process.  Jurgensen writes, “McCarthy shuns interviews, but he relishes conversation.” One subject that McCarthy cycles back to several times is the apocalypse, something that he frequently discusses with his friends at the Santa Fe Institute.

Also in the Roundup: Missoula’s Fact and Fiction adjusts to ebooks, Moscow, Idaho’s Joan Opyr celebrates her new novel with leftover turkey, and Denver’s Printed Page Bookshop offers free books in exchange for food donations for the needy.

New West Book Review

Thanks to television shows such as Dora the Explorer, Maya and Miguel, and the trusty Sesame Street, many kids growing up in English-speaking homes can count to ten and say hello in Spanish. Cinco Puntos Press, based in El Paso, specializes in literature that straddles the U.S./Mexico border, and publishes a number of bilingual books for children that will help kids who are interested in Spanish take their language study further.

El Paso-based writer Benjamin Alire Sáenz‘s The Dog Who Loved Tortillas (36 pages, $17.95), with vibrant clay illustrations by Geronimo Garcia, will be a hit with any kid who has ever begged his parents for a dog.  In this story, told in Spanish and English with a clay squiggle dividing the two texts on the same page, Little Diego Domínguez (who previously appeared in A Gift from Papá Diego) and his big sister Gabriela simultaneously hit upon the idea that they should get a dog.  When they ask their parents for a dog a piece, the parents say they can have a dog, but only if they share. (As a mom, I was sort of rooting for the parents to demand more from Diego and Gabriela: fifty whine-free days and nights, cleaning, scullery work.)

Gabriela and Diego agree, secretly thinking, “But it will be more mine.” They adopt a puppy from the humane society, and work hard housebreaking him.  Diego discovers that the puppy, Sofie, will perform tasks in exchange for bites of tortilla.  Sofie becomes well known around the neighborhood as the tortilla-loving dog.  But one morning Diego discovers Sofie “barely moving,” and Mr. Domínguez says, “Her nose is dry and hot.  It’s supposed to be cold and wet.” A trip to the vet is on order.  Uh oh, I thought, maybe dogs aren’t supposed to eat tortillas? 

Western Book Roundup

Economic conditions and their implications for the book industry continue to be dire, and yet I have mostly good news to report this week.

• First, several prestigious literary magazines across the nation are facing budget cuts or conversion to online-only publication, including the New England Review, TriQuarterly, and The Southern Review, but in Boise, according to Idaho Review editor Mitch Wieland in an interview with Boise Weekly, “While other universities are cutting their budgets for their literary magazines, the administration here at [Boise State] has actually increased our funding in support of what we do.”

Wieland spoke to Bill English of Boise Weekly last month on the occasion of the publication of The Idaho Review‘s tenth anniversary issue.  It didn’t take long for The Idaho Review to vault into the top tier of literary magazines, with its stories and essays regularly winning national awards.  Writer and Boise State teacher Alan Heathcock told the Boise Weekly:

“The success of The Idaho Review is all Mitch Wieland.  Every journal in the country is writing letters to big name writers, asking them to send work. Mitch has some special charm that when he asks Rick Bass, William Kittredge or Ann Beattie, they not only send work, but they send great work. Ten years ago, Boise State didn’t even have a writing program, and now is known nationwide largely because of the reach and reputation of The Idaho Review.”

• My second bit of good news: Bill Husted, gossip columnist for the Denver Post, reported Sunday, “HBO is developing a movie based on Denver author Steve Knopper’s book Appetite for Self-Destruction: The Spectacular Crash of the Record Industry in the Digital Age.”

Also in the Roundup: How the boxer Rocky inspires writer Benjamin Percy, a vintage Cormac McCarthy ad in Dwight Garner’s Read Me, and how books by women were left off a key best-of-the-year book list.

New West Book Review

Best of the West 2009: New Stories from the Wide Side of the Missouri
Edited by James Thomas and D. Seth Horton, foreword by Rick Bass
University of Texas Press, 268 pages, $19.95

Best of the West 2009 is a welcome revival of anthology series that ran from 1988 through 1992, collecting outstanding stories set in “the Wide Side of the Missouri” that previously appeared in literary journals.  Unlike some recent one-off Western story anthologies, such as New Stories from the Southwest (also edited by D. Seth Horton) and Forge Books’ Best Stories of the American West, Volume I, the editors plan to make this an annual publication, and in the 2009 edition, the quality of the stories is just as high as those in the well-known national Best American Short Stories series.

In the foreword, Rick Bass tries to put his finger on “what constitutes a Western short story,” and although he notes, “Is it my imagination, or are there extra teaspoonfuls of loneliness in these stories, extra pinches of desperation?” and “a good many Western short stories tend to possess a kind of intensity or power of the felt physical senses,” he decides, “I’m not convinced there is a Western short story, yet.” Bass doesn’t remark on it, but in this year’s anthology, the overwhelming common theme is sex: the people in these stories might be lonely, but they manage to partner up pretty well.

Western Book Roundup

As I’ve mentioned on a couple of occasions over the years I’ve written the Roundup, when I’m not reading other people’s books, I’m trying to write my own, and after many, many years of effort, I have some good news: my first novel, The Ringer, will be published by The Permanent Press in 2011.  I am delighted about it.  Now I just need to edit the book and figure out how to convince people to read it.  (Beg?  Bribe?  Cajole?) Check out my new website for more information.

• The winners of the Utah and Oregon Book Awards were announced recently.  In Utah, the winners included David McGlynn in fiction for The End of the Straight and Narrow, Stephen Trimble in nonfiction for Bargaining for Eden: The Fight for the Last Open Spaces in America, and in the poetry category, Craig Arnold won the award posthumously for his collection Made Flesh.  Ben Fulton of the Salt Lake Tribune wrote in greater detail about all the winners.

Also in the Roundup: Oregon Book Award winners, events at the Center of the American West, and Annie Proulx donates her papers to the New York Public Library.

New West Book Review

The Lacuna
By Barbara Kingsolver
HarperCollins, 464 pages, $26.99

Barbara Kingsolver worked her way up to becoming one of America’s Current Top Novelists the old-fashioned way, beginning by writing smaller, tightly-focused novels with some autobiographical elements, earning a loyal readership through word-of-mouth and independent bookseller raves in her former home base of the Southwest, then expanding her stories to globe-spanning epics such as her riveting The Poisonwood Bible.  Kingsolver has followed up her recent nonfiction bestseller Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, about her family’s quest to eat locally-grown foods for a year, with her first novel in nine years, The Lacuna, a sweeping tale that follows a young man destined to become a popular American novelist in the years before and after he befriends Frida Kahlo, Diego Rivera, and Leon Trotsky.  The Lacuna is another epic work, setting one man’s story against the grand events of early twentieth century history, and it’s also a bildungsroman and an epistolatory novel, for those AP English students keeping score at home. 

The Lacuna is one of a handful of titles which Amazon and Walmart, in their current book-price war, will sell for nine bucks, along with genre fiction juggernauts including the latest books by John Grisham and James Patterson.  Kingsolver’s novel is an ironic pick, because leftist politics are at its heart and its protagonist, Harrison Shepherd, is a reclusive, mostly-celibate gay man who writes about Aztec and Mayan history, elements which would not normally cause the books that house them to fly off the shelves.  But The Lacuna will please Kingsolver’s plentiful fans because it is full of the qualities that her books have always contained—striking, precise detail, human passion, vivid language, snappy dialogue, and a singularly fascinating character in Kingsolver’s imagining of Frida Kahlo.

Western Book Roundup

Helena-raised Kevin Connolly is on the road talking about his new memoir, Double Take.  He’ll visit Bozeman today (Country Bookshelf, 7 p.m.), and he’ll be in Helena on October 28 (Montana Book Company, 7 p.m.), and in Missoula on October 29 (Fact & Fiction, 7 p.m.). 

The 24-year-old Connolly was born without legs, but according to his bio on his publisher’s website, he “was otherwise a healthy baby and grew up like any other Montana kid; getting dirty, running in the woods, and getting dirty some more.”

Connolly began taking photographs four years ago, traveling around the world on a skateboard and “documenting the reactions” people had to him.  The photos in this series became ”The Rolling Exhibition,” which Connolly’s website describes as: 31 Cities, 32,000 photos, one stare.” Double Take is getting great reviews; Kirkus Reviews described it as “A courageous, immensely rewarding chronicle expressed in arresting words and pictures.” Visit Connolly’s website for an entertaining trailer about his experience reading an ebook on an over-sized PC.

Also in the Roundup: A Utah State senior wins the national Norman Mailer Award for nonfiction, two forthcoming regional novels, and David Sax finds some good Jewish delis in the Rockies.

New West Book Review

Twisted Tree
by Kent Meyers
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 289 pages, $24

Kent Meyers’ haunting new novel, Twisted Tree, opens with an invented quote from a police officer speaking in a 2003 article in the fictional Spokane Plain Dealer, entitled “Is There an I-90 Killer?”: “We believe it’s the same man.  Both victims were female, extremely thin.” On the next page Meyers begins his complicated narrative with the first-person voice of a serial killer, a man who targets anorexic women along I-90, kidnaps, rapes, and kills them, and breaks their bones, although as one character chillingly observes, nobody knows in exactly what order he carries out those vile acts.  He researches his victims on pro-anorexia sites on the Internet, and as Twisted Tree opens, he discovers his target, Hayley Jo Zimmerman, or HayJay, at the store where he knows she works in the Rushmore Mall in Rapid City, South Dakota, and entices her into leaving with him.

Meyers brings the chapter to the moment where Hayley Jo realizes what her fate will be, then he leaves her, plunging the reader into the thoughts of the supermarket checkout clerk in Hayley Jo’s hometown of Twisted Tree, South Dakota.  The clerk, Elise Thompson, spent some time as a missionary in South America, and vaguely knew Hayley Jo, as did everyone in this small town.  The book carries on like this, jumping from one character’s first-person narrative or third-person perspective to the next, moving back and forth in time, offering up many sharp, moving passages, such as the story of a poor Native American boy’s brief triumph as an elementary school marble champion.  In this way Meyers fashions a portrait of the town, filled with the large and small tragedies, the frustrated hopes and the minor triumphs of its people.  Meyers brilliantly displays the abuse, the secret loves, and private dreams that form the hidden motivations of this community.

New West Book Review

Wisdom of the Last Farmer
by David Mas Masumoto
Simon & Schuster, 238 pages, $25

David Mas Masumoto‘s Wisdom of the Last Farmer will make you want to go out and pay a farmer more than the asking price for his produce at a market.  Masumoto grows organic peaches, nectarines, and grapes on his farm in California’s central valley, carrying on in the tradition of his family.  His grandparents emigrated from Japan over a hundred years ago with the dream of buying land.  Because they weren’t native born Americans, laws forbade them from purchasing land, so instead they worked in other people’s fields and suffered through internment in the Arizona desert during World War II.  But they persevered and eventually their sons established the 80-acre farm that Masumoto now runs with his wife and children. 

Masumoto is on a mission to preserve flavorful heirloom peaches that his family has grown for decades, varieties most farmers have abandoned because of supermarkets’ demands for harder, redder peaches with longer shelf life and transport durability.  Masumoto wants people to experience the “Sun Crest peach, a fat and juicy gem with a stunning, honeyed flavor.” If people could try it, he thinks, they probably wouldn’t settle for the fruit that’s sold as peaches today.

In Wisdom of the Last Farmer, Masumoto, a columnist for the Fresno Bee and the award-winning author of several previous books, discusses his father’s decline in the wake of a stroke, and how their hard work in pursuit of a perfect peach breaks their bodies and spirits down.  “Organic farming is not simple or easy,” Masumoto writes.  “It’s easy to want to be environmentally responsible, but it’s a damned hard thing to achieve.  I cannot replace tedious labor with faster technology or equipment when things go wrong.”

David Mas Masumoto will be in Utah to present his book in Salt Lake City at the King’s English Bookshop on Thursday, October 22 (5:30 p.m.).  On October 23 and 24, he will participate in the Moab Confluence “Eating the West” literary festival, and on October 25 he will visit Denver’s Tattered Cover (Colfax, 2 p.m.) as a part of the Rocky Mountain Land Library reading series.

Western Book Roundup

This year’s Montana Festival of the Book, which begins Thursday, has an incredible lineup scheduled.  The October 23 reading with humorist David Sedaris is sold out, but there’s so much else going on that nobody who missed out on tickets for that event should go home with an empty brain. 

On Thursday, October 22, four renowned crime novelists will participate in the panel discussion ”The Last Good Kiss: An Appreciation of James Crumley.” Michael Koepf will interview Dennis Lehane, George Pelecanos, Laura Lippman and James Grady about “the work of Montana mystery writer James Crumley and its impact on the mystery genre and literature as a whole” (Wilma Theatre, 3 p.m.).

Many writers of some of the great books I’ve reviewed here over the past few years will offer readings, including Maile Meloy (with Dennis Lehane and Andrew Sean Greer on Thursday, October 22, Wilma Theater, 7:30 p.m.), Marianne Wiggins and Kevin Canty (with James Lee Burke, October 24, Wilma Theater, 7:30 p.m.), and Rick Bass (October 24, Holiday Inn, 11 a.m.). 

Bass and Wiggins will participate on a panel discussion called “Locating the Novel” that sounds fascinating, described in The Missoulian in this way: “Some novels are ‘high concept.’ Some authors start out with a setting, a room, a landscape. And sometimes the story begins with the sound of a voice, a character. How does the ‘initiating impulse’ affect the final product? And do some authors only hear voices while others always see visions?” (October 23, with Andrew Sean Greer, and Peter Orner, Holiday Inn, 2:30 p.m.)

The one presentation that makes me wish teleportation existed so that I could just zap myself up to Missoula is “‘The Wire,’ An Interview,” with the show’s creator David Simon, and George Pelecanos, one of the show’s co-producers and writers (Holiday Inn, October 24, 1 p.m.).

Also in the Roundup: A call for submissions to an anthology about living and working in the National Parks, Sun Valley’s Hemingway festival, a Boise man wins Esquire’s fiction contest, Denver novelist Carleen Brice shares her home with the Denver Post, and David Wroblewski kicks off his paperback tour.