Books & Writers
Obituary
Book Editor Smith Shepherded Some of the West’s Best
Carol Houck Smith, who championed some of the West's best contemporary writers, including Rick Bass and Pam Houston, has died at age 85.
Smith was an editor with W.W. Norton & Co. and had an knack for discovering and shepherding award-winning writers.
A full obituary by Patricia Sullivan is in the Washington Post today and includes this gem from Smith:
An editor's job "is to discover what the intention of the writer is, and then to try and stand in for the general reader and assess whether the writer has fulfilled that intention. I think it's a chemical relationship between author and editor, in the same way that you're attracted to friends when you meet them, and so the editor has really joined the book."
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NEW WEST BOOKS ROUNDUP
Western Authors Top the Times
Check out last Sunday’s New York Times’ top books of the year and you’ll find several books from New West territory.
No surprise that Wyoming’s prolific Annie Proulx makes the list of 100 notable books with her latest collection Fine Just the Way it is: Wyoming Stories 3. Jim Harrison, who splits his time between Arizona and Montana, makes the list with his latest, The English Major, the tale of a farmer and former English teacher who heads West after his wife leaves him.
Idaho native Marilynne Robinson makes the list with Home, a revisiting of her bestselling Gilead, told this time from a different perspective. Charles Bock lands with his first novel Beautiful Children, the story of the disappearance of a 12-year-old boy in Bock’s native (and gritty) Las Vegas.
Colorado breakthrough author David Wroblewski missed the "notable" list, but he landed on Times reviewer Janet Maslin’s list of her picks with his debut novel The Story of Edgar Sawtelle. Sawtelle’s American Hamlet has been a hit with everyone from Amazon to Oprah. Wroblewski, Maslin says, was “2008’s happiest surprise.”
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NEW WEST BOOK REVIEW
“Remarkable Curiosity” a Remarkable Journey
A Remarkable Curiosity: Dispatches from a New York City Journalist’s 1873 Railroad Trip across the American West
By Amos J. Cummings and Jerald T. Milanich
University Press of Colorado, 371 pages, $26.95
In 1873, Amos Jay Cummings, a popular New York Sun newspaperman and decorated Civil War veteran, set out on a westward adventure aboard the newly-completed transcontinental railroad. During his six-month sojourn from Kansas to California, Cummings telegraphed amusing, engaging and spirited commentaries of the American West back to readers in New York.
Collected by scholar Jerald T. Milanich in A Remarkable Curiosity: Dispatches from a New York City Journalist’s 1873 Railroad Trip across the American West are Cummings’ long-since forgotten accounts of a land and personalities unlike anything New Yorkers found familiar. They included eccentrics like Pedro Armijo, the New Mexican sheep tycoon who was one of the most extensive livestock breeders in the West, the Mormon prophet Brigham Young and one of his wives, the indignant lecturer Ann Eliza Young, who was pursuing a divorce at the time Cummings arrived. Other characters included three-card Monte players, confidence men, railroad magnates, gold seekers, land speculators and wheat farmers.
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WESTERN BOOK ROUNDUP
‘First Dog’ is Top Dog
Montana author Jessica Solberg has won the Moonbeam Children’s Book Awards gold medal for best first book for her tale First Dog: Unleashed in the Montana Capitol.
Solberg’s book tells the real-life story of Jag, the canine special assistant to Montana Gov. Brian Schweitzer. Told from Jag’s point of view, Solberg’s book teaches children about what a governor does and how the state government works. It also brings a message: The government belongs to them, and one day, they could find themselves sitting at the governor’s desk.
The Moonbeam Children’s Book Awards are presented by Jenkins Group and Independent Publisher Online. They are designed to bring increased recognition to children’s books and their creators, and to support childhood literacy and lifelong reading. The awards will be presented at the Children’s Museum of Denver on Jan. 23.
The Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association has released its short list for its 2009 book awards, and Oregon author Floyd Skloot shows up twice.
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Author Steve Stuebner's latest guide to outdoor Idaho
Boise’s First-Ever Road Cycling Guide ReleasedOutdoorsy Boiseans won’t be surprised to hear that Idaho author, photographer and cartographer Steve Stuebner has released another of his guides to outdoor sports. The first-ever road cycling recreation and fitness guide to 30-plus rides in the greater Boise Valley and Canyon County, Boise Road Cycling Guide was released Monday.
It’s Stuebner’s seventh trail guide, and for that and other good reasons, he’s a local celebrity. He lives and breathes outdoor sports and promotes the responsible enjoyment of them, relentlessly. And cheerfully. You really can’t beat Steve for cheerful.
Many people around the world know of Idaho’s beauty through Stuebner’s award-winning writing and photography for a wide variety of newspapers and magazines, including The New York Times, Outside, Paddler, National Wildlife, The Intelligence Report, Columbia Journalism Review and High Country News.
My favorite of Stuebner’s books is “Salmon River Country” with spectacular photos by Mark Lisk.
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Part 2: Oregon, Utah, Wyoming, and Other Western States
Best Books of 2008, Part Two
In part two of the NewWest.Net/Books Best Books of 2008 list, I’ll discuss my favorite books set in Oregon, Utah, Wyoming, and other Western states.
Oregon
One of my favorite books set in Oregon actually was published late last year, but I didn't get to mention it in last year's best books list. Benjamin Percy's short story collection Refresh, Refresh (Graywolf Press, 249 pages, $15) makes the landscape of central Oregon come alive, enhancing the mystery and brutality of the characters. The title story (which won the Plimpton Prize from the Paris Review and earned a spot in the Best American Short Stories 2006) conveys 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. This year, Percy won a $50,000 Whiting Award for his work. (Check out my interview with Percy from earlier this year.)
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Part 1: Colorado, Idaho, Montana and New Mexico
Best Western Books of 2008
It's time for my second annual Best Western Book list, and as I did last year, I'm going to focus on books set in this region (with a few exceptions for excellent books written by writers from this region but set elsewhere), naming my favorites from each state. I managed to read 53 books this year, and these are the books from our region that most impressed me. Please add your favorites in the comments section. Today I’ll discuss Colorado, Idaho, and Montana, and New Mexico and tomorrow it’s on to Oregon, Utah, Wyoming, and other Western states.
Colorado
The biggest book story this year in Colorado, and heck, just about the whole country, is the phenomenal run of David Wroblewski's The Story of Edgar Sawtelle (Ecco, 562 pages, $25.95). Wroblewski, who lives in Westminster, Colo. discussed how he made the transition from software engineer to novelist in my interview with him this summer. Buoyed by extremely positive word of mouth among independent booksellers, book buyers, and other book industry people, as well as glowing blurbs from Richard Russo and Stephen King, Sawtelle hit the New York Times bestseller list on June 29 and has remained there since, getting an additional boost from Oprah, who selected it for her Book Club in September.
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NEW WEST BOOKs
Excerpt: Famous Firearms of the Old West, by Hal Herring
Simply put, Hal Herring's new book, Famous Firearms of the Old West (Hardcover, TwoDot, $24.95) is a collection of stories about 12 guns that shaped the history of a region.
But while the firearms, owned by the likes of Geronimo, Wild Bill Hickock and Western gunman Tom Horn, are the fulcrum of the book, the masterful storytelling -- of the hands that held them, the battles that revolved around them and the historical context in which they fired -- is what makes the book sing.
As Herring, a NewWest.Net contributor, writes himself in the preface, the guns "exist now as windows into the men and women who fought -- righteously or not -- and died, or were willing to die, with them. What they conjure up can be a powerful magic."
That "powerful magic," captured by one of the region's best storytellers, is what sets this book apart.
In the following excerpt, Chapter 9, Herring tells the story of Tom Horn, one of the West's most famous bounty hunters, and his Winchester Model 1894 rifle. -Courtney Lowery
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WESTERN BOOK ROUNDUP
Eating - and Reading - Locally
Thanksgiving is a good time to eat, and it’s a good time to think about what and how we eat. Books on our food culture have almost become a genre in and of itself in recent years. Several excellent books have peeked into the back of the cupboard to see some of the dark corners we’d rather not see. Others have looked for another approach to food.
Here are a few, by Western authors, that are worth a Thanksgiving Day read by the woodstove before you drift off on a tryptophan cloud.
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NEW WEST BOOK REVIEW
“White Mary,” and a Heart of Darkness
The White Mary
By Kira Salak
Henry Holt and Company, 368 pages, $25
Author Kira Salak lives in Montana, but her writing takes her – and her readers – to some of the most forbidding places on the planet.
Usually those voyages are in the form of travel essays. Salak is a contributing writer to National Geographic Adventure magazine. Her thoughtful reportage, from the Amazon to Timbuktu, is often anthologized in the annual Best American Travel Writing series by the Houghton Mifflin Co. Her fiction has appeared in Best New American Voices.
Salak returns to familiar ground as a traveler to exotic lands, only this time as a novelist, in her debut novel The White Mary. She brings to the novel the same profound insight and deft storytelling that have made her essays such standouts. With it, she also joins the ranks of travelers like Paul Theroux and Peter Matthiessen who have found themselves comfortable both in the fiction and nonfiction stacks.
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