This book is American in all its implications - big, full of beauty and of hope. It is the record of an American boy's torments and thrills, his slow maturing, his inhibitions, his aspirations. It is a story of adolescent love and of creative activity in America.

The fourteen stories in this collection are set in the sometimes magical, sometimes brutal Southwest: a multi-ethnic, contemporary West that encourages the reader to see beyond the stereotypes of the Old West. All of the stories depict the emotional and psychological costs of the prejudices and injustices of the Old West that have carried over into the present. Gish s vivid storytelling utilizes compelling voices and gritty characters, tracing the recognition of remnant violence, racism, sexism, and environmental pollution carried over from earlier generations. Cutting through class and...

The first collection of Joanne de Longchamps's poetry and collages that spans her entire writing and artistic career. A gifted collage artist and published poet, de Longchamps is widely regarded as Nevada s foremost poet of the 1960s and 1970s. Sadly, she died in isolation in 1983. She was quoted as saying "Nevada hardly knows me as a poet." Eight of the author's collages are reproduced in the book in black & white. Edited byShawn Griffin. Foreword by Harold Witt."

This enlarged edition of The other California, originally published in 1990, contains nineteen essays (six of them new to this collection) on the landscape, literature, and life in the Great Central Valley of California. A vast, flat patchwork of fields and orchards about the size of England, the Valley has become the richest farming region in the history of the world. It also has a rich literary tradition: William Saroyan, Joan Didion, William Everson, Maxine Hong Kingston, Gary Soto, and Richard Rodriguez were all raised in this agricultural heartland.

Clark's classic novel is a compelling tale of four men who fear a marauding mountain lion but swear to conquer it. It is also a story of violent human emotions--love and hate, hope and despair--and of the perpetual conflict between good and evil.

Haslam explores the rural areas and small towns of his native region California's Great Central Valley in this collection of twenty-five short stories. The stories are filled with a principally masculine cast that is as culturally diverse as the West gets: a Chinese laborer, a Portugese farmer, a Vietnamese schoolboy, a black cowboy, and an Armenian poet, just to name a few. These pieces range from traditional stories to vignettes to sketches and talks as Haslam seeks literary structures that powerfully project his characters and their experiences. The author s triumph in these stories is...

This novel follows native Nevadan Jack Ross, a private investigator who has about had it with murder and betrayal and is teetering on the edge of emotional collapse. But when called upon by a friend to help a young prostitute locate her grandfather, missing these forty years, he hits the cold trail again. Lawrence Parker vanished after killing a man, and Ross s search for him leads into the big silence of the desert, taking him through the alleys and backstreets of Reno to the doorstep of one of Nevada s most influential families. The flicker of changing identities, the shadow of blackmail,...

Reno private investigator Jack Ross has been in the desert for six months when his respite is interrupted by television reporter Miranda Santee. She need's Jack help to solve a story. Miranda has an old photograph of two Las Vegas showgirls who allegedly robbed a mobster of one million dollars thirty years earlier. One of the women is dead, the other missing. Only one piece of the story can pull Ross out of the desert the dead showgirl was his mother. Now, the man who always believed his mother s death was an accident must find out if she was murdered."

The nature of the Old and New West is fully reflected through dialects, beliefs, occupations, and actions in this collection of thirteen plays with complete stage directions. Set in Arizona, Nevada, and Utah from the mid-1800s to the present day and focusing on veterans, children, prostitutes, priests, the newborn, and newly dead, these one-acts written by playwrights who know the region give voice to those who created and continue to recreate the West. This collection of contemporary plays, written out of love and concern for the region, examines as never before the western myths rooted in...

Wilber Stevens sees poetry as a way of seeing things, of focusing on the awesome dimensions of being alive. In this collection of poems, Stevens explores the complex connections between place and experience; life and death; the world of books and the quotidian world of work, pain, and loss.