The Best Books of 2009 from New Mexico, Oregon, Utah, Washington, Wyoming, and Other Western States

Today I bring you the second half of the third annual New West Best Books in the West list, with notable books of 2009 from New Mexico, Oregon, Utah, Washington, Wyoming, and other Western states.

New Mexico

The Colorado writer John Vernon is the latest to try his hand at capturing the quicksilver Billy the Kid in his novel Lucky Billy (Houghton Mifflin, 294 pages, $24), which displays the famous outlaw from a variety of angles, and creates a sympathetic though not simplistic portrait of a man who felt beset and compelled to fight back from his earliest days as a poor, small-for-his-age urchin on the streets of New York. Vernon sets his story in Lincoln, New Mexico, site of the Lincoln county war, the events of which Vernon posits sent Billy down his outlaw path. The literature of Billy the Kid is extensive, but there will always be room for another book on the subject that is as finely written as is Lucky Billy, a novel that ultimately rewards a reader’s attention, and delivers a convincing, human portrait of the legendary outlaw.

The Best Books of 2009 from Alaska, Colorado, Idaho & Montana

It is my pleasure to bring you the third annual New West Best Books in the West list.  Today and tomorrow, I’ll be running down the best books set in the American West or written by authors from this region that have been published since I put together last year’s list. As usual, I’ll break my selections down state by state.  I normally stick to the Rocky Mountains, but this time I threw in Alaska and Washington, the settings of several of this year’s exceptional books.  And I’m adding a new twist: on Wednesday I’ll narrow this list down and announce my picks for the top five books of 2009 set in the West.

Alaska

In 2005, Steven Rinella won an annual lottery that Alaska holds to grant a handful of hunters permits to kill a wild buffalo.  The real winners of that lottery are the readers who have been able to enjoy Rinella’s tale of that buffalo hunt in his fascinating, entertaining book American Buffalo: In Search of a Lost Icon (Spiegel & Grau, 304 pages, $15). Rinella, a former Missoula resident, examines the iconic buffalo from a variety of angles, packs the book with fresh facts, stories, observations and lore about buffalo. Rinella could probably write about dirt and make it interesting—he sure makes buffalo chips seem intriguing. “The perfect specimen,” Rinella writes, “has the circumference of a baseball cap, with folded layers like a sheik’s turban.”

Western Book Roundup

Fly Rod & Reel Magazine named Thomas McGuane its “Angler of the Year” for 2010.  Author Nick Lyons wrote an enthusiastic essay about McGuane’s prowess with words, his lifelong devotion to fly-fishing, and how he combines the two.  Lyons writes:

“Tom McGuane…has loved fly-fishing for more than five decades, since he fished the rivers and small creeks of Michigan as a boy; he has pursued trout, false albacore, steelhead, bonefish, striped bass, permit and salmon with great passion and success; he has fished from Tierra del Fuego to Russia, Iceland, New Zealand, Ireland, Canada, Florida and throughout his now-native Montana, and widely elsewhere; and along with his great novels and stories and films has written, with dazzling skill, much about what he calls his ‘life in fishing.’ He is Fly Rod & Reel’s Angler of the Year and my Angler for the Last Hundred Years.”

According to Lyons, the 70-year-old McGuane recently completed a new novel. (Via Twitter.com/mathiak)

• It’s time for the annual stampede of best books of the year lists.  Check back here next Monday for my list of 2009’s best books set in the West.  In the meantime, several books from this region have been charting on national best book lists, most notably Dave Cullen‘s Columbine, which as Amazon book blog Omnivoracious notes, is one of the thirteen books to appear in the New York Times 100 Notable Books of 2009, the Publisher’s Weekly best book list, and the Amazon list.

Cullen, a successful journalist based in Denver, has lived in Colorado since 1994.  (We both attended the University of Colorado creative writing program in Boulder, and I’ve met him a few times.) He first began covering the Columbine shootings for Salon.com, and stuck with the story for a decade, releasing his universally acclaimed account of the murders earlier this year. 

Also in the Roundup: Christie’s to auction Cormac McCarthy’s typewriter, Those Strenuous Dames of the Colorado Prairie, and an odd Ronald McDonald book signing.

Western Writers

Robert Greer has been a surgical pathologist and Professor of Pathology at the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus in Denver for 35 years and has written a number of books, including ten CJ Floyd mysteries, a series that he began in 1996 with The Devil’s Hatband. Greer’s new novel, Spoon, is the story of an itinerant, biracial, clairvoyant ranch hand, Arcus Witherspoon, who comes to work on the Montana ranch of the Darleys, a family that is overburdened by ranch chores and grief over the long-ago death of their first son. Spoon is filled with earnest portraits of its characters, accurate details of ranch life, and plenty of suspense as a greedy developer plots to claim the Darleys’ land.  I recently interviewed Robert Greer via email about how he came to write Spoon, how a document signed by Warren G. Harding informs him of the mineral rights on his ranch, why African American characters are underrepresented in fiction with Western settings, and how his many vocations have “kept [him] moving ahead rather than sinking since [his] wife’s death.”

New West: You tell Spoon’s story from the first-person perspective of the 19-year-old T.J. Darley, son of the rancher who employs Spoon.  This technique of using a first-person narrator to describe and observe a larger-than-life focus character has a long history in American literature.  Why did you decide to write the book from T.J.’s perspective instead of Spoon’s?

Robert Greer: I rarely in fact write in the first person because I generally write mystery or suspense novels and it has always been my contention that those types of novels need an omniscient, third person narrator. I employed first person narration in Spoon because I needed a tighter, more insightful character-driven book without all the so-called “flash and trash” of commercial fiction. In a literary novel that is largely character-driven there needs to be an immediacy that can sometimes be lacking with third person narration. I also thought the book would be a little less believable if Spoon told his own story, so I had T.J. Darley, who’s struggling with his own identify, tell the story. 

Western Book Roundup

In this week’s Roundup, I’ll be taking a look at a few of the many literary magazines in our region.

Whitefish Review is a journal based in Whitefish, Montana, that is five issues and two years into what will hopefully be a long and fruitful run.  Recently Whitefish Review gained nonprofit status from the IRS, which will allow them to seek grants and accept donations.  In a press release, founding editor Brian Schott described the journal’s mission: “From the beginning, we wanted to see if we could create a non-commercial publishing venue for the increasingly sprawling network of artists, photographers, and writers in the interior American West.” Lynette Hintze wrote a profile of the Whitefish Review in The Daily Interlake, in which the editors discuss how they got an interview with John Irving for the Spring 2010 issue.

Whitefish Review features nonfiction, fiction, poetry, art, and photography, and has published a number of the region’s best-known writers, such as Rick Bass, Terry Tempest Williams, Pam Houston, and Tim Cahill.  But judging from the last few issues, the journal’s emphasis is on featuring new writers, including some young winners of a local high school writing contest.  The Whitefish Review will have its next open submission period from January 1 through March 15.  The next issue hits bookstores (and will be available for purchase online) on December 17.  It will include work by London-based writer and philosopher Alain de Botton, skier Scot Schmidt, and political cartoonist Jeff Danziger.

Also in the Roundup: CutBank, Isotope, and Idaho Review.

Western Book Roundup

The Denver Post reported this weekend that Denver writer Mark Obmascik‘s Halfway to Heaven: My White Knuckled and Knuckleheaded-Quest for the Rocky Mountain High won this year’s outdoor literature prize from the National Outdoor Book Awards Foundation: “The book is about climbing Colorado’s 14,000-plus foot mountains, all 54 of them, in one summer. The problem, though, as Obmascik points out in this humorous work, is that he’s completely out of shape.” Obmasik was the lead writer for the Denver Post team that won the 2000 Pulitzer Prize for its coverage of the Columbine shootings. He will discuss his book at the REI in Boulder on November 30 (7 p.m.).

• John Jurgensen’s insightful interview with Cormac McCarthy ran in the Wall Street Journal last week in advance of the opening of the film version of The Road.  Their discussion ranges all over the place in subject matter, from the movie versions of McCarthy’s films, to fatherhood, to his writing process.  Jurgensen writes, “McCarthy shuns interviews, but he relishes conversation.” One subject that McCarthy cycles back to several times is the apocalypse, something that he frequently discusses with his friends at the Santa Fe Institute.

Also in the Roundup: Missoula’s Fact and Fiction adjusts to ebooks, Moscow, Idaho’s Joan Opyr celebrates her new novel with leftover turkey, and Denver’s Printed Page Bookshop offers free books in exchange for food donations for the needy.

From Wyofile

Sweetwater Station, Wyo.—If you blink once or your attention drifts for an instant on the two-lane highway between Muddy Gap and the Lander, Wyoming, you may miss one of the world’s great road signs, a weathered, wooden square flanked by an American flag:  “Old Books Fresh Eggs For Sale.”

And if you don’t stop and go inside the two-story, structurally-reinforced, climate-controlled book barn stuffed with more than 75,000 hardback volumes ranging from leather-bound Balzac to first-edition Beatrix Potter, you will miss one of Wyoming’s and the Mountain West’s hidden treats.

Owners Lynda “Mad Dog” German and Polly “The Pilgrim” Hinds moved their Mad Dog and The Pilgrim Booksellers from Denver to Sweetwater Station in 2000 after an unpleasant encounter with the Aurora, Colorado, Police Department.

Western Book Roundup

Economic conditions and their implications for the book industry continue to be dire, and yet I have mostly good news to report this week.

• First, several prestigious literary magazines across the nation are facing budget cuts or conversion to online-only publication, including the New England Review, TriQuarterly, and The Southern Review, but in Boise, according to Idaho Review editor Mitch Wieland in an interview with Boise Weekly, “While other universities are cutting their budgets for their literary magazines, the administration here at [Boise State] has actually increased our funding in support of what we do.”

Wieland spoke to Bill English of Boise Weekly last month on the occasion of the publication of The Idaho Review‘s tenth anniversary issue.  It didn’t take long for The Idaho Review to vault into the top tier of literary magazines, with its stories and essays regularly winning national awards.  Writer and Boise State teacher Alan Heathcock told the Boise Weekly:

“The success of The Idaho Review is all Mitch Wieland.  Every journal in the country is writing letters to big name writers, asking them to send work. Mitch has some special charm that when he asks Rick Bass, William Kittredge or Ann Beattie, they not only send work, but they send great work. Ten years ago, Boise State didn’t even have a writing program, and now is known nationwide largely because of the reach and reputation of The Idaho Review.”

• My second bit of good news: Bill Husted, gossip columnist for the Denver Post, reported Sunday, “HBO is developing a movie based on Denver author Steve Knopper’s book Appetite for Self-Destruction: The Spectacular Crash of the Record Industry in the Digital Age.”

Also in the Roundup: How the boxer Rocky inspires writer Benjamin Percy, a vintage Cormac McCarthy ad in Dwight Garner’s Read Me, and how books by women were left off a key best-of-the-year book list.

Western Book Roundup

As I’ve mentioned on a couple of occasions over the years I’ve written the Roundup, when I’m not reading other people’s books, I’m trying to write my own, and after many, many years of effort, I have some good news: my first novel, The Ringer, will be published by The Permanent Press in 2011.  I am delighted about it.  Now I just need to edit the book and figure out how to convince people to read it.  (Beg?  Bribe?  Cajole?) Check out my new website for more information.

• The winners of the Utah and Oregon Book Awards were announced recently.  In Utah, the winners included David McGlynn in fiction for The End of the Straight and Narrow, Stephen Trimble in nonfiction for Bargaining for Eden: The Fight for the Last Open Spaces in America, and in the poetry category, Craig Arnold won the award posthumously for his collection Made Flesh.  Ben Fulton of the Salt Lake Tribune wrote in greater detail about all the winners.

Also in the Roundup: Oregon Book Award winners, events at the Center of the American West, and Annie Proulx donates her papers to the New York Public Library.

Western Book Roundup

Helena-raised Kevin Connolly is on the road talking about his new memoir, Double Take.  He’ll visit Bozeman today (Country Bookshelf, 7 p.m.), and he’ll be in Helena on October 28 (Montana Book Company, 7 p.m.), and in Missoula on October 29 (Fact & Fiction, 7 p.m.). 

The 24-year-old Connolly was born without legs, but according to his bio on his publisher’s website, he “was otherwise a healthy baby and grew up like any other Montana kid; getting dirty, running in the woods, and getting dirty some more.”

Connolly began taking photographs four years ago, traveling around the world on a skateboard and “documenting the reactions” people had to him.  The photos in this series became ”The Rolling Exhibition,” which Connolly’s website describes as: 31 Cities, 32,000 photos, one stare.” Double Take is getting great reviews; Kirkus Reviews described it as “A courageous, immensely rewarding chronicle expressed in arresting words and pictures.” Visit Connolly’s website for an entertaining trailer about his experience reading an ebook on an over-sized PC.

Also in the Roundup: A Utah State senior wins the national Norman Mailer Award for nonfiction, two forthcoming regional novels, and David Sax finds some good Jewish delis in the Rockies.