Idaho Bookstore Owner Dies in Car Accident

By Jenny Shank, 5-14-08

	Caption: Image courtesy of iconoclastbooks.com.

This week brought some sad news for the Idaho book community: Sun Valley Online reports that Gary Hunt, the owner of Iconoclast Books in Ketchum and the Sun Valley Mall, was killed in a car accident Saturday morning.  Sun Valley Online established the blog Gary Hunt Remembrances for people to leave their messages about the man whom they describe as “a kind soul and passionate family and business man.”

In the U.S., literary award givers tend to constrain themselves to a list of four or five semifinalists for a prize, but in the U.K. folks like a long, long list, and last week the people behind the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Prize announced a group of 39 challengers for this year’s €35,000 prize, as the Guardian reported.  Our region has a strong contender in Oregon native Benjamin Percy’s collection Refresh, Refresh, which will vie against books by such short fiction heavyweights as Roddy Doyle and Jhumpa Lahiri.

University of Idaho creative writing professor Brandon R. Schrand has received plenty of good news recently.  He reports on his website that his essay “Eleven Ways to Consider Air” has been selected for this year’s Pushcart Prize Anthology.  The essay was originally published in Ecotone, a magazine that describes itself as “a literary journal of place that seeks to publish creative work about the environment and the natural world while avoiding the hushed tones and clichés of much of so-called nature writing.”

Schrand’s essay will also appear in the forthcoming Borne On Air: Essays by Idaho Writers, and his first book, published this week by the University of Nebraska Press, will be featured this summer in Barnes & Noble’s Discover Great New Writers program.  Check back here Friday for my review of his new memoir, The Enders Hotel, about growing up in Soda Springs, Idaho.

Deanne Stillman recently interviewed Larry McMurtry in LA Observed on the occasion of his receipt of the Los Angeles Public Library Award.  Among the insights: McMurtry sees the U.S. not as a “cowboy culture” but as a “suburban culture,” and he still doesn’t think the American West has produced a truly great book, though he allows that Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men is a “very good book.”

Stillman’s new book, Mustang: The Saga of the Wild Horse in the American West, which we excerpted here last year, will be published by Houghton Mifflin next month.

Finally, Publisher’s Weekly reports that the Association of American Publishers, Borders, and Las Comadres (a nationwide networking group for Latinas) are launching a Latino book club. Each month the group will feature a different book and hold events in Borders stores in eight states, including New Mexico and Utah.  The group has announced its selections for the rest of 2008, which will kick off in June with a focus on Christina Garcia’s A Handbook to Luck.

Have some regional literary news or events to share?  If so,