Western Book Roundup

Zane Grey’s Cabin, and Westword Names NewWest.Net/Books Best Literary Blog

By Jenny Shank, 5-21-08

	Photo courtesy of Westword.com.

Popular western novelist Zane Grey’s one-room cabin in Oregon will now be preserved for everyone, according to Jeff Barnard of the Associated Press. (Via Texas Pages.) Barnard writes:

“One of the most popular sites on the Rogue River is a rude one-room cabin of peeled logs and hand-split shingles. The cabin was once owned by Zane Grey, best known for his Western novels including ‘Riders of the Purple Sage.’ But now the 32 acres and the buildings on it belong to everyone.

This month, the cabin was bought by the Trust for Public Lands and sold to the U.S. Bureau of Land Management, which is nominating it for the National Register of Historic places. The purchase means that the site will remain open to visitors.”

Utah State professor Christopher Cokinos recently won this year’s John Burroughs Prize for his essay “The Consolations of Extinction” published last year in Orion (and available online here).  The John Burroughs Association gives the annual award for an “outstanding published nature essay.”

The Burroughs committee explained that “Cokinos has given us personal involvement in an integration of scientific positions in a humanistic essay with meditations on what the past and present world gives us.”

In the essay, Cokinos writes:

“I often feel overwhelmed by the enormity of the end-Permian extinction. Nearly everything dead. Everywhere. It’s nearly unfathomable.

I often feel overwhelmed by the enormity of another extinction event, our current crisis, the Holocene extinction, the sixth known mass die-off in the planet’s history and the only one whose cause is due to the activity of conscious, rational, intelligent beings, activity that has driven the extinction rate to one thousand times higher than the background rates in the fossil record.

Sometimes I feel that I’m supposed to save the entire biosphere. Sometimes I just hang my head in exhaustion and doubt.”

And hey, NewWest.Net/Books won something too!  I was looking through Westword’s recent 25th annual Best of Denver issue online, and discovered that we’d been named Best Literary Blog 2008:

“There are plenty of literary bloggers in Colorado, but most tend to divert their attention toward the coasts as the default harbingers of lit life. Not so at the New West website, which has a thread devoted to books and writers in the Rocky Mountain region. Boulder-based writer Jenny Shank offers almost-daily updates on local readings, publishing gossip and reviews of books penned by real, live Colorado authors; the blog also features in-depth interviews with such authors as Kent Haruf and Nick Arvin. Yes, Denver does have a lively literary scene--and you can find it right here.”

Sweet!  You can see framed copies of Westword’s coveted Best of Denver Awards hanging in restaurants and other businesses all over the Denver area--so I think I’ll have to frame this and maybe attach it to my…refrigerator?  Or maybe to my enormous book pile.  Though the added weight could cause it to topple.

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

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