Western Book Roundup
Wallace Stegner’s Family Objects to Altered Book
By Jenny Shank, 12-12-07
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The heirs of Wallace Stegner are upset that Discovery! The Search for Arabian Oil, an altered version of a book the late author wrote, was recently published by Selwa Press. Lisa Leff wrote for the AP: “The owner of Selwa Press, Timothy Barger, is the son of the former president of a U.S. company [ARAMCO] that hired Stegner in 1956 to pen a promotional piece about its history. Stegner, who is known as the literary laureate of the American West, was treated to two weeks in Saudi Arabia and paid about $16,000 for his effort.”
According to Page Stegner, Wallace’s son, the press omitted passages that “portrayed ARAMCO critically or would have caused problems between the company and Saudi Arabia’s leaders.” Page Stegner and Carl Brandt, Wallace’s literary agent, have asked Selwa to pull the book from shelves or put a disclaimer in every copy, a request that the publisher has not yet complied with.
Dwight Garner at the New York Times Book Review Papercuts blog recently interviewed Denver native Ted Conover, the nonfiction writer who won the National Book Critics Circle Award in 2001 for his book New Jack: Guarding Sing Sing. Conover reports that he’s working on a book about roads: “There are five roads, in five different countries, and I traveled each one in the company of someone to whom the road means something special.”
The Lit Blog Co-op, whose motto is “Uniting the leading literary weblogs for the purpose of drawing attention to the best of contemporary fiction, authors and presses that are struggling to be noticed in a flooded marketplace,” has chosen University of Montana MFA Matthew Eck’s “The Farther Shore” for its Winter 2007 Read This! selection. The book will be discussed on various literary blogs this week. Eck was also recently featured on NewWest.Net/Books in this profile by Kisha Lewellyn Schlegel.
Denver Post Books columnist and novelist David Milofsky included Colorado-raised, Missoula-based Aryn Kyle’s The God of Animals in his recent list of favorite books of the year. “Full disclosure,” he writes, “Kyle was once my student at Colorado State University, but that was long before she was at work on this book.”
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Comments
This version that I published contains exactly every word Stegner used in the original paperback edition of Discovery! The edition that he personally revised and approved for release under his own name in 1971. I've added proper front matter, back matter and rare photographs of the era to give the work the respect it deserves.
I have every right to proudly publish Discovery! as I guess Page and Brandt have every right to smear Stegner's work by implying that he didn't personally approve a work that he released under his own name. Who are they to dispute the author's decisions?
Unfortunately, this dust up clouds the crystaline beauty of Stegner's words within:
"Suddenly the solid earth veered before their eyes, the intense light flawed and changed, and unknown Arabia - grinned at them - a sudden distorted grin - as the ring of the horizon boiled and floated with mirages."
Until now Discovery! has been all but forgotten for 35 years and never available to the American public, so I'm pleased to present the dynamic prose words of a great author on a subject that virtually no one has ever considered. A story that begins 75 years ago on the other side of the earth in a distant kingdom.
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=17188267&sc=emaf