A Look Ahead at 2010 Books and the Mystery of the Thieving Boulder Author

By Jenny Shank, 12-30-09

I’ll start the final Roundup of the year with a look ahead at some intriguing books by regional authors set to come out in 2010.

In January, Then Came The Evening, the debut novel by Idaho native Brian Hart, hits bookstores.  According to Hart’s bio, he “spent years working as a janitor, carpenter, welder, and commercial fisherman before earning his M.F.A. from the Michener Center for Writers at the University of Texas at Austin.” The now-defunct Kirkus Reviews described it in this way: “Hart’s evocative debut traces the long descent of a tragic Western figure straight out of a Sam Shepard play… Desiccated descriptions of a long-fallow landscape and the author’s ability to conjure up the ghosts of a low man’s past further enrich this heartbreaking, convicing drama. A haunting Western tale.”

Speaking of Sam Shepard, the playwright, actor, filmmaker, and fiction writer has a new short story collection out January 12, Day Out of Days. From the book jacket description:

“A man traveling down Highway 90 West gets trapped alone overnight inside a Cracker Barrel restaurant, where he is tormented by an endless loop of Shania Twain songs on the overhead sound system. A wandering actor returns to his hometown against his better instincts and runs into an old friend, who recounts their teenage days of stealing cars, scoring Benzedrine, and sleeping with whores in Tijuana. A Minnesota family travels south for a winter vacation but, caught up in the ordinary tyrannies of family life, remains oblivious to the beauty of the Yucatán Peninsula. A solitary horse rancher muses on Sitting Bull and Beckett amid the jumble of stuff in his big country kitchen—from rusted spurs and Lakota dream-catchers to yellowing pictures of hawks and galloping horses to ‘snapshots of different sons in different shirts doing different things like fishing, riding mules and tractors; leaning up against their different mothers at radical angles.’”

In February, Graywolf Press will publish a new short story collection by Wyoming’s Alyson Hagy, Ghosts of Wyoming.  Novelist Joy Williams wrote of the collection: “Sharp, mournful tales and dead-on yarns. Hagy knows Wyoming well, her stern weathers and defiant beauty and patient ruthlessness. She knows too how this land fashions and tests her ghosts, both living and long gone.”

In March, Knopf will publish Wyoming author Mark Spragg’s third novel, Bone Fire.  The novel carries on the stories of Griff, who was a little girl in An Unfinished Life, and Paul, the little boy from The Fruit of Stone.

Colorado-raised fiction writer Aryn Kyle will publish her first short story collection in April, the follow-up to her critically praised novel, The God of Animals.  One of the tales in Boys and Girls Like You and Me: Stories was featured in the Best American Short Stories, and others have appeared in The Atlantic, The Georgia Review and the Alaska Quarterly Review. Kyle earned an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Montana, and recently moved from Missoula to New York.

Look for reviews of all these books here soon.

• Margo Rabb’s recent essay for the Sunday New York Times about increasing shoplifting from bookstores included this intriguing passage about the Boulder Book Store:

“At Boulder Book Store in Boulder, Colo., one writer was even busted stealing his own books. Christopher Ohman, who was a manager at the time, said: ‘I think he felt somewhat entitled to the copies. In some ways I can kind of understand that logic. I mean, it’s a commonly held misconception that authors get as many copies of their books as they want, and that’s not always the case.’ (Ohman conceded that the author’s alcohol problem may also have had something to do with it.)”

This piqued the curiosity of the people at Gawker, who asked, “WHO could this possibly BE?” The people who commented on the post came up with some pretty convincing guesses.  Vanessa Miller investigated the mystery for the Boulder Daily Camera.  Miller writes, “Scott Foley, who is now the floor manager for the Boulder Bookstore, wouldn’t disclose the name of the thieving author but said his attempt to swipe his own tome has become an infamous story told during security training for new bookstore employees.”

• The annual ranking of America’s most literate cities came out recently.  Seattle tops the list this year, with Portland, Oregon coming in at number six and Denver placing tenth.  Denver may have dropped from seventh last year and fourth in 2007 because of the demise of the Rocky Mountain News and other factors.

According to USA Today, “The study is by Jack Miller, president of Central Connecticut State University in New Britain, Conn., who for seven years has compiled the literate-cities list. It focuses on six indicators: newspaper circulation, number of bookstores, library resources, periodical publishing resources, educational attainment and Internet resources.”

• Finally, check out the Winter issue of Prairie Schooner if you get the chance.  One of my short stories, “Lightest Lights Against Darkest Darks,” is in it, along with a book review by Boulder’s Marilyn Krysl and poetry by Eugene, Oregon’s Sara Burant and Idaho’s Stephen Gibson.

Happy New Year, everybody!

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