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Western Book Roundup

The rather dispiriting saga of Montana writer and philanthropist Greg Mortenson continues this week, with two Montana residents, Jena Price of Great Falls, and Missoula Rep. Michele Reinhart, filing suit against the author of Three Cups of Tea in the wake of allegations on the news program “60 Minutes” that he fictionalized some aspects of the book and misused funds intended for his charity, the Central Asia Institute. According to the AP, the suit “claims Mortenson and CAI [his nonprofit, Central Asia Institute] committed fraud by inducing them to donate and buy his book.” The Missoula Independent reports Montana Attorney General Steve Bullock is investigating Mortenson and CAI.

Kim Murphy of The Los Angeles Times interviewed Bozeman residents about the controversy (“With philanthropist under attack, hometown comes to his defense”), and found most people still support Mortenson, including the owner of the Country Bookshelf.

Also in the Roundup: Regional book prize news.

New West Book Review

In Manuel Muñoz‘s entrancing first novel What You See in the Dark (Algonquin Books, 251 pages, $23.95), a character called The Director, based on Alfred Hitchcock, observes, “Small towns are filled with people who notice every little detail.” Muñoz, who teaches at the University of Arizona, has paid utmost attention to detail in this novel that reimagines the filming of Psycho in the sleepy town of Bakersfield, California in 1960. Muñoz sets the filming of that classic movie against the murder of a young woman that occurs at the same time.

Muñoz writes with exquisite control of atmosphere, mood, perspective, and image—not unlike Hitchcock’s technique—as he builds the moving story of the murder of Teresa, a young Mexican woman, at the hands of her white lover. The narrative switches between several perspectives, beginning with a skillful second-person collective voice that we come to learn speaks for the town of Bakersfield in 1960 as a whole, and also for Candy, Teresa’s jealous co-worker at the shoe store.

Manuel Muñoz will discuss What You See in the Dark at the Tattered Cover (Colfax) on May 11 at 7:30 p.m.

Western Book Roundup

Helen Thorpe‘s Colorado Book Award-winning Just Like Us is out in paperback now, and it includes an update about the lives of her subjects, four young Mexican women who grew up in Denver, two with U.S. citizenship and two without. On May 12, Thorpe will speak at the Arvada Public Library, and on May 15 she will participate in the Dean’s Forum at St. John’s Cathedral in Denver. In October, Just Like Us will be the featured book for One Book One Town in Carbondale, Colo.

• Brady Udall‘s excellent novel The Lonely Polygamist is out in paperback now too. Udall will appear at the Jackson Hole Writers Conference, along with Cristina García, Gary Ferguson, and Stephanie Elizondo Griest from June 23-26. The conference is open for registration now. (Check back on New West in late June for David Abrams‘ report on the conference.)

Also in the Roundup: Robin Black is this year’s Lighthouse Fly-By Writer, the new Mountain West Poetry Series, lit champ Jennifer Egan to headline the Literary Sojourn in Steamboat Springs, and Women Writing the West conference tickets are on sale now.

New West Book Review

Kevin Desinger‘s debut novel, The Descent of Man (Unbridled Books, 272 pages, $24.95), jumps off to a brisk start when a forty-year-old man named Jim wakes up in the middle of the night and looks out his bedroom window to see two men attempting to steal his Camry. His wife Marla tells him to call the cops, but instead he heads outside to try to foil the theft. He observes them for a moment, then, as Desinger writes, “something in the Camry broke off with a loud snap, and one of the car thieves swore. At the same time something in me snapped too.” Jim, a mild-mannered man suddenly filled with rage, hops into the men’s truck, drives it down the road into a ditch, and beats it with a galvanized pipe. Jim can’t account for his own actions, and begins to craft a series of lies to cover up what he did from Marla and the police.

Kevin Desinger will discuss The Descent of Man in Portland at Powell’s on May 3 (7:30 p.m.), Woodstock Wine & Deli on May 7 (7:30 p.m.), and Broadway Books on May 10 (7:30 p.m.).

Western Book Roundup

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.”

Also in the Roundup: A new story by Thomas McGuane in The New Yorker, Boulder writer Florence Williams is a finalist for a prestigious award, the busy career of Boulder scholar Adam Bradley, and the Colorado Book Award finalists and Oregon Book Award winners are announced.

New West Book Review

Claudia Sternbach’s moving memoir Reading Lips: A Memoir of Kisses (Unbridled Books, 224 pages, $12.95) is composed of essays about the memorable kisses in her life. It’s a clever concept, but what makes this book so easy to love is its offbeat execution of this idea—you never quite know how the kiss will turn up in the stories. Will it be a comforting kiss, an ominous kiss, a romantic kiss, or a missed kiss?  Sternbach has written newspaper columns for many years, and her breezy prose has a natural, effortless quality that is surely the result of great care.

One of the strengths of Reading Lips is Sternbach’s ability to capture the evolution of her thoughts, emotions, and sensory perceptions at each age. The voice is recognizably the same, but in the early chapters the details convey the quirky viewpoints of a child’s perception, free of the rote language adults use to describe common objects and experiences, like this moment from a visit to her mother’s office: “She showed us her desk, stacked with papers and in and out boxes. And the machine she used to do all of the adding and subtracting. She showed us how it worked. I liked the sound it made. Noisier than a typewriter. A fatter noise.”

Western Book Roundup

Sometimes we journalists have to go into some pretty harrowing situations to investigate our stories. Take Ted Conover, who has become a train-hopping hobo, served a stint as a prison guard at Sing Sing, trekked with Mexican migrants, hung out with icky shallow Aspen people, and traversed some of the world’s most dangerous roads.

My assignment last Thursday took me to the Evil Companions Literary Award celebration at the Oxford Hotel in Denver, honoring Denver-raised Conover, and benefiting the Denver Public Library Friends Foundation. Like Conover, I wanted to embed myself in this unfamiliar world, try to fit in, and find out what I could learn. The ballroom was packed with a sold-out crowd of stylish, bookish people, and the open bar was serving a martini called the Sing Sing Sling. For research, I sampled several of them. I met a nice woman who told me that Ted Conover used to baby-sit for her children. I also met a pair of lovely geneticists from the University of Colorado who drank with me and geeked out over our mutual past participation in the Denver Museum of Nature and Science’s paleontology certification program. We all wished we had been able to drop everything and go on that mastodon dig in Snowmass. Sigh.

Also in the Roundup: Colorado connections to this year’s Pulitzer Prizes, and several observers question the truth of Three Cups of Tea by Bozeman’s Greg Mortenson.

New West Book Review

Philip Connors has spent eight seasons in a high, isolated outpost as a wilderness lookout in the Gila Wilderness of New Mexico, the “epicenter of American wildfire,” spotting fires for the U.S. Forest Service. How did he become one of the “freaks on the peaks,” and why does he love this job? Connors has plenty to say about these and other subjects in the entertaining and informative Fire Season: Field Notes From A Wilderness Lookout (Ecco, 256 pages, $24.99).

Connors mixes natural, personal, and literary history in this remarkable narrative, along with a touch of Ed Abbey-style ranting against America’s fat, out-of-shape people and the government’s bumbling ways when it comes to wilderness management, allowing cows to graze on public land, and agricultural subsidies. Although Connors spends most of his time in the wilderness alone, Fire Season keeps plenty of company, fitting comfortably and capably into the American nature writing tradition headed up by Thoreau, who went to the woods “to live deliberately,” and carried on by Norman Maclean’s Young Men and Fire, which Connors calls “the one and only masterpiece ever written on the subject of American wildfire.”

Stops on Philip Connors’ book tour include visits to Bookworks in Albuquerque (April 26), Garcia Street Books in Santa Fe (April 29), Moby Dickens in Taos (April 30), Boulder Book Store (May 2, $8 tickets include a discount coupon and will benefit the Fourmile Canyon Fire Department), Tattered Cover (LoDo, May 3), Bookworm of Edwards in Edwards, Colo. (May 4) and Maria’s Bookshop of Durango, Colo. (May 5, 6:30 p.m.)

Western Book Roundup

Boise’s Anthony Doerr continued his winning streak last weekend, collecting the The Sunday Times EFG Private Bank Short Story Award for his story “The Deep,” which came with a £30,000 prize. (Last month he won the $20,000 Story Prize for his collection Memory Wall). Doerr spoke with the Boise Weekly just before the win, and noted that the award ceremony was to be held in the Great Hall of Christ Church College at Oxford University, “where they film the great hall of Hogwarts.” It’s like I’ve been telling you these past months--literary Boise is en fuego.

• Craig Johnson reported in his newsletter that filming will begin this month on a television pilot based on his Walt Longmire mysteries. Johnson notes that the crew is filming in the “Las Vegas/Taos/Santa Fe area of New Mexico, since it was deemed that Wyoming’s weather was too unstable for shooting a series and had too much snow to appear to be spring.” The show, for Warner Horizon and A&E, will be called “Longmire.” Johnson explains if the pilot gets picked up, they will film a dozen episodes for the first season, “borrowing chunks of the novels, but following their own tales because of the amount of stories they need to tell and the time constraints in which to tell them.” (Via Wyoming Arts Blog.)

Also in the Roundup: Chris Abani speaks in Utah, Western readers snap up eBooks, and Philip Connors visits the Boulder Book Store.

Western Writers

On Thursday Ted Conover will be awarded the Evil Companions Literary Award, the longest-running literary prize in Denver, honoring distinguished writers with ties to the West. According to the website of the Denver Public Library Friends Foundation, “the award pays homage to a group of Denver writers who met in the 1950s and ‘60s to drink and discuss writing, and dubbed themselves the Evil Companions.” Conover grew up in Denver and has produced five engrossing, acclaimed works of investigative journalism, beginning with 1984’s Rolling Nowhere: Riding the Rails with America’s Hoboes, which he published when he was 26. Conover’s Newjack: Guarding Sing Sing was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and won the National Book Critics Circle Award. His most recent book, The Routes of Man: Travels in the Paved World (Vintage, 352 pages, $15.95), is now available in paperback. I invited Conover to take a look back at his accomplished career, and he answered some questions via email about his books and how he sought to “move beyond the interview, that staple of journalism, to a deeper understanding, a felt knowledge.”

New West: You attended Denver Public Schools and graduated from Manual High School. In Rolling Nowhere, you mention that your father was a lawyer with a large downtown firm, but you went to school with students from less privileged circumstances. Did attending diverse schools contribute to your desire to immerse yourself in other cultures?

Ted Conover: Yes. It showed me that some important things were not on the curriculum—but suggested that maybe I could teach myself about them, nevertheless.

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