These informal interviews of Wallace Stegner, conducted by Richard Etulain reveal his thoughts and observations on our society and culture. Topics covered in the interviews range from his fiction and non-fiction writings to his views on conservation and mankind's relationship with the planet.

An important quarterly for West Coast writers, ZYZZYVAjoins an elite handful of literary magazines in celebrating a tenth anniversary. In honor of that celebration, a collection of the journal's greatest pieces from 1985-1994 has been assembled. Edited by the journal's founder, Howard Junker, it is a valuable anthology of contemporary writing in the Pacific states. Anti-canonic and quirky in the best West Coast tradition, this anthology helps define a place, a time, a way of life, and a community."

"Stories turn corners. They bump into you: You take them " So New York writer Benjamin Kohlman has been told by one of many former bosses. Alone again and desperate, Kohlman has finally found"his" Janice Stewart, recently acquitted of the grisly arson/murder of her father-in-law. Kohlman follows Janice to Las Vegas where she works as a keno runner. Anxious to start his book, Kohlman offers Janice, now known as Angel, a contract. The elusive, innocent Angel construes it as a marriage contract, and Kohlman's bizarre adventures begin.

Mysteriously treated like a high-roller in the casinos,...

In this multicultural collection of ten short stories, Gish moves through settings as diverse as the contemporary California coast and the ghost-haunted hills of Oklahoma Indian Territory, exploring the complex intersections between myth and personal choice, intentional mischief and fate-driven misadventure. His bad boys and black sheep are men of all ages and backgrounds who come to a crucial moment of existence when they must confront the consequences of their past. Gish is a master at evoking the cultural diversity of the West and the spirit of the people who live there men who fecklessly...

Kirk Robertson, according to critic William Kittredge, is "one of those writers we listen to with gratitude." He is also one of Nevada s best-known poets, and rightly so, because his lean verses powerfully express the realities of life in the modern West its irony, disconnection, sadness, and relentless quest for meaning and a sense of place.

Robertson s view is as vast as the landscape itself, and his voice echoes the place laconic, authentic, rich in irony and the quiet strength of solitary men, full of the harshness and austere power of the High Desert.

This collection incorporates...

Winner of the 1996 Western States Book Award for poetry, Flying Over Sonny Listonexplores with courage, compassion, and bone-deep wisdom the complicated and sometimes heartbreaking task of being human in the modern West. Whether he writes about the tortuous interior landscape of the family or the abused terrain of the Nevada desert, Gary Short is unfailingly honest, tender, and gifted with a vision for the all-revealing detail, the larger, wrenching truth. Although many of the poems are about death or express a deep and painful anger, the book is about survival. We often find in these...

In this third Jack Ross mystery, the Reno private eye is hired by iris-eyed Patsy McLeod to resume a case abandoned as hopeless eighteen years earlier the search for her missing teenage daughter Heather. This time, Ross s investigation leads him from a failed ranch in the desert north of Reno to Sacramento s porno film industry, from the Lake Tahoe homes of the wealthy and powerful to the cramped offices of Berkeley s activist community. On the way, he uncovers layers of deception, greed, corruption, sorrow and murder.

Ross also encounters Martha Reedy, a Berkeley-based P.I. who is as...

These stunning stories explore, with poignancy and wit, the treacherous, alluring, and sometimes painful territories of memory, family, and friendship. These stories teach us that even the right people can harbor hideous secrets, that love, embarrassment, and food can assume bewildering and heartbreaking combinations and that there are many ways of being used by or using other people. Hammond s stories probe beyond the surface of our lives to consider the complexities that underlie the most ordinary of relationships and the painful difficulty by which even small insights are achieved. Her...

An action-packed story set during the violent and conflict-ridden days of the early 20th century, Dust Devilstakes place in the rugged mountains and deserts of Eastern California and Northern Nevada. Ira Hamilton, the teenage son of rugged Indian-hating rancher John D. Hamilton, wins the bronc-riding competition at a local rodeo and comes away with a special prize: a beautiful Arabian colt. But the horse is soon stolen by Hawkeye, a notorious local rustler. Accompanied by Cricket, a young Paiute who has been his closest companion since infancy, Ira vows to retrieve his prize. On the...

The world of acclaimed Native American poet Adrian Louis is harsh and full of pain the blizzard-blasted plains and dusty towns of the northern Midwest, the hopeless barrenness of the Reservation, and a bleak interior world of loss, illness, and despair. Louis s poems bring us to a place where ghosts hitchhike and the traditional pow-wow becomes an affirmation of bitter survival, where the lives of the young end too often in acts of meaningless self-destruction, and where his own existence becomes a daily battle with his cherished wife s decline into the dementia of Alzheimer s disease. Louis...