Summer Books for the Western Reader

By Jenny Shank, 7-18-08

Summer is half over, but there’s still plenty of time to fit in some reading.  Here’s a selection of some of my favorite books that I’ve reviewed for New West so far this year—I’ve picked a collection of short fiction, a book of photography and prose, a novel, a memoir, and a nonfiction narrative.  Click the links to read longer reviews and interviews with the authors.  Happy reading, and let me know what you think.

Refresh, Refresh
By Benjamin Percy
Graywolf Press
249 pages, $15

Central Oregon native Benjamin Percy sets every story in his second collection, Refresh, Refresh, in his home state and makes the landscape comes alive, enhancing the mystery and brutality of his characters.  The title story (which won the Plimpton Prize from the Paris Review and earned a spot in the Best American Short Stories 2006) coveys searing authenticity, brutal energy, and a pitch-perfect dramatization of the impact of the Iraq war on communities that are losing their parents to combat.

West of Last Chance
By Peter Brown & Kent Haruf
W.W. Norton & Company
212 pages, $49.95

Kent Haruf and Peter Brown take the high plains as their muse. Nowhere is that more evident than in West of Last Chance, a unique collaboration mingling Brown’s, beautiful, evocative photographs with Haruf’s brief, incisive writings depicting life on the high plains. They capture the land’s sweep and sky and its unique people, buildings, and signs in a way that is affectionate yet frank about the difficulty of life in the region.

Jackalope Dreams
by Mary Clearman Blew
University of Nebraska Press
390 pages, $24.95

Mary Clearman Blew’s first novel, Jackalope Dreams, tells the story of an aging country schoolteacher who is forced to confront the changes her rural Montana community is undergoing in part because wealthy newcomers are buying the land.  It’s a funny, sad, and keenly observed tale of the old West clashing with the new, and Blew succeeds in busting many Western myths.

The Enders Hotel
By Brandon R. Schrand
University of Nebraska Press
230 pages, $17.95

Brandon R. Schrand’s vivid new memoir chronicles his childhood growing up in the Enders Hotel in Soda Springs, Idaho, where he had a front-row seat to a revolving show of humanity that included drunks, homeless people, ex-cons, murderers, and all manner of other colorful drifters who came to stay in the hotel, drink in its bar, and eat in its café. Schrand proves himself a top-notch yarn spinner with this richly described, poignant memoir.

The Legend of Colton H. Bryant
By Alexandra Fuller
The Penguin Press
202 pages, $23.95

Wyoming-based, Zimbabwe-born writer Alexandra Fuller’s The Legend of Colton H. Bryant is a moving, poetic portrait of a charismatic Evanston, Wyoming man who died in February 2006 when he fell off the oil rig where he was working. Through her affectionate portrayal, Fuller makes readers fall in love with Bryant, carries us through his short life, which leads inevitably to a dangerous job on an oil rig, and makes us stand as witnesses to his end, however much we wish we could turn away.