Getting air, losing a ski. Photo taken at the opening of Sun Valley's new terrain park by Nils Ribi. Read more about the terrain park on Ribi's blog.

See more photos on the New West Images photoblog.

Western Book Roundup

Denver Librarian Finalist for Amazon Award & Jess Walter’s ‘Poets’ Becomes a Film

Gregory Hill, who works as a book buyer at the University of Denver’s Penrose Library, is one of three finalists in the general fiction category for this year’s Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award. According to the contest website, Hill’s novel, East of Denver, “tells the story of Shakespeare Williams, who returns to his family’s farm in eastern Colorado to find his widowed, senile father living in squalor. Facing the loss of the farm, Shakespeare hatches a plot with his father and a motley crew of his former high school classmates to rob the local bank.”

Greg Glasgow recently interviewed Hill for the University of Denver blog. Glasgow writes:

“The story is based on Hill’s own past growing up in Joes, Colo. (called Dorsey, Colo., in the book), and his more recent experiences watching his father’s battle against Alzheimer’s disease.”

Also in the Roundup: The winners of the Reading the West Book Award, Filming on the adaptation of Jess Walter’s The Financial Lives of the Poets begins in August, a poetry contest sponsored by the Denver County Fair, and regional book tours for Karl Marlantes, Janet Fox, Emma Donaghue, and Justin Cronin.

Western Book Roundup

Reading The West & High Plains Book Awards Finalists Announced

Last week two regional organizations announced the finalists for their annual book awards. I’ve listed the finalists below with links to New West’s reviews of the books and author interviews. First, the Mountains and Plains Independent Booksellers Association announced the finalists for its Reading the West Book Awards (that’s the new name of the MPIBA’s longstanding book award series).

The shortlist in the Adult category:

• Finders Keepers: A Tale of Archaeological Plunder and Obsession by Craig Childs (Little, Brown and Co.)

• The Wake of Forgiveness by Bruce Machart (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)

• Volt: Stories by Alan Heathcock (Graywolf Press)

• Fur, Fortune, and Empire: The Epic History of the Fur Trade in America by Eric Jay Dolin (W.W. Norton)

• The Ringer by Jenny Shank (The Permanent Press)

Also in the Roundup: The finalists for the High Plains Book Awards, The Whitefish Review seeks donations for its ninth issue, The High Desert Journal announces a poetry prize, and the tally on how many books Oprah helped David Wroblewski and Cormac McCarthy sell.

New West Book Review

‘In This Light’ Collects Utah Writer Melanie Rae Thon’s Greatest Hits

The accomplished writer Melanie Rae Thon grew up in Montana and teaches at the University of Utah. In This Light: New & Selected Stories (Graywolf Press, 256 pages, $15) collects some of the highlights of her career, and there have been many—her stories have regularly appeared in the Best American Short Stories, O. Henry Prize Stories, and Pushcart Prize anthologies. Thon frequently sets her stories in the West, but they follow none of the typical paths Western writers are often expected to take.

Thon focuses on people who exist on the fringes of society, who are damaged, dispossessed, addicted to drugs, alcohol, sex, or all three, people who never have the chance to stop and admire the landscape—like the homeless kids of Kalispell in her story “Heavenly Creatures"—they’re too busy scrapping for survival. Thon relentlessly turns her attention on people that society ignores, and describes them with intense language in stories that are replete with ghosts.

Western Book Roundup

Book Festivals of the West 2011

Each year readers and writers gather to celebrate the written word at book festivals, fairs, and writing conferences throughout the West. Although there are a few spring festivals, everything really begins to pick up in June, and the schedule remains busy through November.

The offerings vary from those that concentrate on helping writers improve their craft, such as the Lighthouse Writers Workshop’s retreat in Grand Lake, Colo. (July 10th-15th), to those that introduce writers to readers through panels, readings, and book signings, such as the Montana Festival of the Book in Missoula (October 5th-7th). Some, such as the Aspen Summer Words Festival (June 19th-24th), combine workshops and readings. The workshops charge fees, but plenty of the festivals are free to attend, including the Montana Festival of the Book in Missoula and the Equality State Book Fair in Casper. Most workshops are already accepting applications for this year.

I’ve updated the Book Festivals of the West map with this year’s information when it was available. Please let me know if there are any more events to add or update—I’ll even throw this open for events in California and Texas. New West will run reports from the festivals again this year—we already have correspondents lined up for the Jackson Hole Writers Conference, Aspen Summer Words, and the Montana Festival of the Book, and are looking for more contributors.

Western Book Roundup

Anthony Doerr Extends Winning Streak and New Mexico Will Star as Wyoming in ‘Longmire’ TV Pilot

Boise’s Anthony Doerr continued his winning streak last weekend, collecting the The Sunday Times EFG Private Bank Short Story Award for his story “The Deep,” which came with a £30,000 prize. (Last month he won the $20,000 Story Prize for his collection Memory Wall). Doerr spoke with the Boise Weekly just before the win, and noted that the award ceremony was to be held in the Great Hall of Christ Church College at Oxford University, “where they film the great hall of Hogwarts.” It’s like I’ve been telling you these past months--literary Boise is en fuego.

• Craig Johnson reported in his newsletter that filming will begin this month on a television pilot based on his Walt Longmire mysteries. Johnson notes that the crew is filming in the “Las Vegas/Taos/Santa Fe area of New Mexico, since it was deemed that Wyoming’s weather was too unstable for shooting a series and had too much snow to appear to be spring.” The show, for Warner Horizon and A&E, will be called “Longmire.” Johnson explains if the pilot gets picked up, they will film a dozen episodes for the first season, “borrowing chunks of the novels, but following their own tales because of the amount of stories they need to tell and the time constraints in which to tell them.” (Via Wyoming Arts Blog.)

Also in the Roundup: Chris Abani speaks in Utah, Western readers snap up eBooks, and Philip Connors visits the Boulder Book Store.

Western Book Roundup

Ruth McLaughlin’s “Bound Like Grass” Wins the Montana Book Award

This year’s Montana Book Award winner is Ruth McLaughlin’s moving memoir, Bound Like Grass: A Memoir from the Western High Plains (University of Oklahoma Press). The prize committee praised it for its “acute observation,” honesty, and beautiful writing. The committee also named four honor books published in 2010:

Everything by Kevin Canty (Nan A. Talese)

Goodbye Wifes and Daughters by Susan Resnick (University of Nebraska Press)

The Last Stand: Custer, Sitting Bull, and the Battle of the Little Bighorn by Nathaniel Philbrick (Viking)

Visions of the Big Sky: Painting and Photographing the Northern Rocky Mountains by Dan Flores (University of Oklahoma Press)

The winners will be honored at the Montana Library Association conference in Billings on April 7. McLaughlin will do a victory lap at several bookstores in Montana: in Bozeman at the Country Bookshelf on March 29, in Hamilton at Chapter One Bookstore on March 30, and in Missoula at Fact and Fiction on March 31. All readings are at 7 p.m.

Also in the Roundup: Boise’s Alan Heathcock launches Volt, Benjamin Percy reads in Denver, and three Western bookstores are in the running for the Bookstore of the Year Award.

New West Book Review

Bierstadt Meets Bigfoot in Jonathan Evison’s “West of Here”

Deep into West of Here, Jonathan Evison’s entertaining, expansive novel of Western American settlement and its aftermath, a contemporary parolee named Timmon Tillman finds himself “forced to concede that his fate was inextricably linked in the most arbitrary ways to things and people and events he’d never given a thought to.” This idea serves as a sort of a structural thesis statement for the book, whose action jumps between the late nineteenth century beginnings of Port Bonita, a fictional town on the Pacific coast of Washington state, and the down-on-their-luck residents of the town in 2006, many of them descendents of the early settlers. The ties between the two sets of characters start out loose and gradually tighten as Evison expertly weaves an array of seemingly disconnected plot threads into a panoramic tapestry.

Jonathan Evison will discuss West of Here at the Tattered Cover (Colfax) on February 28 (7:30 p.m.), at the Boulder Book Store on March 1 (7:30 p.m.), at The King’s English in Salt Lake on March 3, and at several events throughout Washington and Oregon this spring.

New West Feature

Utah Pawn Shop Law Requiring Fingerprinting Threatens Other Secondhand Shops

Owners of secondhand bookshops, used CD stores and antique shops in Utah say a board of pawn shop owners and law enforcement officials has been trying to use the state legislature to drive them out of business, and they’re sick of it.

“They want to make it so that any dealer of secondhand goods would have to obey the same draconian laws as pawn shops,” says Ken Sanders, owner of Ken Sander’s Rare Books, a prominent used bookstore in downtown Salt Lake City. “That would put me and a lot of other people out of business.”

Book Excerpt

An Excerpt from “No Communication with the Sea” by Tim Sullivan

Tim Sullivan has reported for several western newspapers and magazines, including The Salt Lake Tribune and The Oregonian, and now works as an urban planner and designer. A native of Salt Lake City, he currently lives in Oakland, California. The following is an excerpt from the preface of Sullivan’s book No Communication with the Sea: Searching for an Urban Future in the Great Basin (University of Arizona Press, 240 pages, $19.95).

The Great Basin, that vast, dry hole in America, is not often associated with great cities. It’s understandable. The region is the most sparsely inhabited in the continental United States. The cities at its edges, chiefly the metropolitan regions surrounding Salt Lake City, Utah, and Reno, Nevada, are regarded as overgrown mining camps, Wild-West theme parks, zealous religious colonies, or—worst of all—bland American suburbia. The lore of the Great Basin, instead, is gleaned from its exoticism, from its differences from the rest of the country: the unbounded freedom, the space, the natural resources, and the scenery. The Basin has the loneliest road in America, bombing ranges and chemical incineration plants, and the legendary steep-and-deep skiing made possible by its strange hydrography.

But great cities are possible here. They’d better be.