My Page: Allen M. Jones
The Best Titles from the Small Presses
A Bookish List for the Holidays
It can be tricky, choosing a book to give as a present. Apart from the unlikely possibility that the thing will actually be read, there are all sorts of other considerations roiling under the surface. For instance, is it expensive enough? Also, does it make me seem smart and sophisticated and in-the-know? And most of all, is it going to be easy to wrap? In the West, the smartest move is almost always to avoid the big Manhattan houses in favor of regional relevance. Anyway, pulling a book off the shelf as you walk into Borders violates the first rule of holiday book buying: Make it look like you’ve put some thought into this. And so, small regional presses. That’s the way to go.
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Fried Twinkies, Buckle Bunnies, and Bull Riders
An Interview With Author Josh PeterThe author of the new, and very well reviewed book on the Professional Bull Riders circuit, Fried Twinkies, Buckle Bunnies and Bull Riding, was kind enough to recently sit down with New West and give us his opinions on everything from what makes a guy climb on a bull for the first time to why the sport has recently been finding such popular appeal. [more]
A New West Book Review
Fried Twinkies, Buckle Bunnies, and Bull Riders, by Josh Peter
Rodeo. It’s hard to imagine a sport more freighted with American symbolism. Forget for a minute the whole cultural, Clint Eastwood romantic undercarriage. Six shooters and sunsets. That sort of thing. Instead, hold it up alongside our few other national pastimes. Like baseball, it’s a sport (arguably) born on American soil. With football, it often asks for a token sacrifice of cartilage and tendon. Next to boxing, it cultivates, in its fans, a remnant of coliseum, Christians-versus-lions schadenfreude, a screaming for blood. Unlike these sports, however, rodeo has its roots in practical hard work, in western capitalism, in utility. Breaking horses, twisting steers, calf roping, it all began as an exhibition of cowboy talent, an attempt to establish bragging rights. Turn er loose, open er up, grab some leather and roll your spurs. Here’s how you do it, fellers. But then there’s bull riding. Nothing practical here. No good, utilitarian reason in the world to strap yourself to an 1,800 pound slobber-slinging, horn-hooking, pissed off Brahma cross named Tender Kisses. No, bull riding is all about cojones, jewels, huevos. Who’s got the biggest. Being tougher’n a shelled cob. Getting hooked in the ass then buying a round, showing off your scars to a whole ‘nother set of hookers. Also, money. Making a hobo’s railcar living, sure, but with the elusive, unlikely possibility of a huge payoff at the end. It’s about entertainment. Ours more than theirs. The point could be argued, but seems like most people watch bull riding for the same reason they watch Nascar. For the wrecks. [more]
Western History, Revisited
Three New Looks at Buffalo Bill CodyThe waves of literary and academic fashion roil according to their own inexplicable laws. In much the same way that gas stations and fast food joints congregate on certain street corners, books of a stripe tend to emerge in unpredictable clusters. While Buffalo Bill Cody has long been a staple of Western kitsch -- along with your rubber tomahawk and multi-colored headdress, you've always been able to buy Cody coloring books, a canonized hagiography or two, maybe a bobble-head doll for the dashboard -- serious treatments of his life have been few and far between. [more]
A Writer's Journal
On The Relevance of the Literary NovelA couple days ago, I delivered another novel to my literary agent. I don’t know about the title. I’m unsure about the tone. Humor could read as irony, irony as cynicism; cynicism as naivete. Three hundred pages and two years of constant fretting, the tap-tap-tap of a single tiny hammer into hard marble, late night slumps (this is shit, utter shit) and early morning exultations (genius, utter genius). A million and a half tiny little decisions with regard to dialogue, pacing, structure, backstory. And now – in this most-vulnerable stage, alee of the dreadful-done, waiting for the first e-mail, the first reaction – I can’t help but consider the validity of the discipline. Never mind my own work, what about the literary novel itself? Where in a world of dramatically competing entertainments does a quiet and introspective art form fit? It feels like it should matter. But does it, really?
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A New West Review
With Respect for Nature: Living as Part of the Natural World, by J. Claude Evans
It's safe to say that there are few academic fields currently as dynamic and polarized, as relevant and urgent, as that of environmental ethics. In the last few decades, it's become not unreasonable to suppose that we might one day soil our own nests in such a way that we've driven even ourselves to extinction. In this milieu, philosophers are at the very forefront of the debate. One of the newest additions to the literature of environmental ethics, Washington University professor J. Claude Evans’ book, With Respect for Nature: Living as Part of the Natural World,* attempts, among other things, to distill and popularize certain heated, controversial, often inaccessible arguments. [more]
Friends at the Ellen Meloy Fund for Desert Writers have notified us that the upcoming Helena Festival of the Book, October 20-23 (in itself, a noteworthy event, featuring authors and editors as varied as Guy Vanderhaeghe, Michael Finkel and New West's own Courtney Lowery and Jonathan Weber) will feature, as its finale on Sunday the 23rd, a reading in celebration of Ellen Meloy's work and life. Meloy's newest book, the posthumously published, Eating Stone, will be the featured title. [more]
A Writer's Journal
Atwood, Lamott, Dillard: The Burgeoning Business of Writers on WritingThat novel writing is a dangerous and mysterious business is a myth spun by novelists. Why not? Every job (plumbers to bush pilots) should be uniquely difficult, requiring an expertise and dedication unavailable to the average Joe. A comforting thought, that we might one day be missed, that the gears of the world will have a hard time creaking along without our presence and approval. Writers need more reassurance in this regard than most. De Gaulle’s essential truth – “The cemetery is full of indispensable people." – is ignored best by those most intent in their pursuit of posterity.
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A New West Review
L.A. Huffman: Photographer of the American West, by Larry Len Peterson
A protégé of Frank Jay Haynes (who would later become the official photographer for Yellowstone National Park), and an emigre from Iowa to Montana Territory’s Fort Keogh (later, Miles City) Huffman came west at the tail end of the Indian wars, just before the final extermination of the buffalo, and on the cusp of the Texas cowherds and the million-acre-ranches of yore. And by god, through it all, he remembered his camera.
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A Writer's Journal
Old Ben to the Big Woods: Where’s our Literature of the Hunt?The art of fiction, if you’re looking for it, has always seemed to me to lie in the neighborhood of the human condition. A facility with language and structured storytelling, a schooling in the great traditions, a talent for seeing forests through the trees, necessary elements all; But the final measure of art, the pith and gist of it, is in how originally and well a fiction manages to show us ourselves. Does it feel true. [more]
