This classic novel, first published in 1906 and based on Mary Austin's own experiences, captures the way of life of shepherds in the Sierra. Austin blends natural history, politics, and allegory in a genre-blurring narrative, championing local shepherds in their losing battle against the quickly developing tourist business in the Western Sierra during the nineteenth century. Austin had met many shepherds while visiting the Tejon ranches of Edward Beale and Henry Miller, and cultivated relationships with men others often thought of as ignorant, unambitious, and dirty, listening closely to...

In this rich group of stories about Latinos in the American Southwest, Skinner explores many themes. "Archangela's Place" features a wonderful Mexican character who weaves herself permanently into the lives of an Anglo family with enduring results. "Flight" tackles racial misunderstanding between an urban African-American and a rural Chicano woodcutter. Coming-of-age stories, "Eloy" and "Every Head's A World," illustrate in various degrees of tragedy and comedy the complexities faced by Hispanic-American youth. "Careful" is an ironic and humorous story of an encounter between two gay...

InA Black Bridge, Ralph Tejeda Wilson offers both an apparently simple, lucid, palpable surface and a powerfully complex, resonant undercurrent of connotation. The title itself operates as both a symbol of connection and a literal scene. The author has a special gift for compassion, for joy, and insists that his art be put to good purpose: the redemption of individual and communal life. Compassion is allied to sharp observation, conversation allied to reflection and scrutiny."

Short stories and exciting excerpts from Nevada writers offer a sampler of literary talent from the Silver State. Few readers outside Nevada are aware of the richness and diversity of the state's literary community, or of the number of nationally respected writers who make the state their home and often the subject matter of their work. Editor Shaun T. Griffin, in this compelling anthology of contemporary fiction from Nevada, makes a very convincing case that the state's wealth runs to far more than glitz and gold. Here we find a delightful and long-forgotten story by the doyen of Nevada...

Poet Elizabeth Dodd s world stretches from the lightless cave home of the eyeless, transparent fish known as a blindcat to the imagination of painter Georgia O Keeffe. In this brilliantly crafted collection, Dodd reveals her mastery of the medium her closely observed images, compelling metaphors, and deep understanding of and sympathy for the natural world; the rhythms of geologic time; and the seasons of the living year. Dodd possesses the rare gift that links the vagaries of the human experience with the mysterious truths of universal life, the vastness of the night sky with the equally...

Jackson J. Benson, the noted literary biographer and critic, offers a collection of essays on novelist Wallace Stegner. Stegner s fiction was frequently autobiographical, and Benson s essays evaluate the man, his work, and the close connections between the two. In mid-career Stegner became a spokesman for the burgeoning environmental movement, and Benson evaluates this aspect of his career, as well his work for racial equality. These collected essays go beyond Benson s biography of Stegner to explore various aspects of the writer in greater detail."

Martin, the central character of Hart Wegner's powerful short-story cycle, is a middle-aged German emigre who has found a home, of sorts, in the isolated and often surreal setting of contemporary Las Vegas. Exiled at the end of World War II with his parents from their beloved Silesia, the family struggles to come to terms with the turmoil of history and memory while they cope with the challenges of assimilation in an alien setting.
In stories that range from the Nevada desert to the lost world of prewar Silesia, Wegner explores, through the perspectives of Martin, his aging parents, and...

Katharine Haake's"The Height and Depth of Everything"is a book of journeys in which displaced women make unsettling forays into the new West. There, some violent expression of nature disrupts their lives, forcing them to readjust their vision of the world. Like the places they live Washington state in the aftermath of the eruption of Mount St. Helens; the rubble-strewn epicenter of Southern California after a recent earthquake; the flooded streets of a desert town in Utah the characters in this collection are all "picking up the pieces" of lives shaken by both natural and spiritual disaster....

Lake Rose Davis is the only child of former hippies who settled in a small Idaho mill town in the late 1960s. Her parents' eccentric lifestyle makes Lake an outcast among the children of the town, and the unspoken tensions among the adults of her parents' social universe puzzle and disturb her. She ponders over her mother's infidelities and the mysterious resentment between her mother and her grandparents far away in St. Louis, and between her mother and her aunt, a conventional career woman relentlessly in search of love.

As a teenager, Lake joins her grandparents in Missouri and spends...

In 1968, Jackson J. Benson, then a naive young literature professor, set out to write a critical appraisal of John Steinbeck, a writer who Benson thought was greatly undervalued by the scholarly establishment. To Benson's amazement, he shortly found his project turning into an authorized biography.Looking for Steinbeck's Ghostis Benson's engaging account of his experiences over the fifteen years he devoted to writing that biography. On one level, the book is a rich collection of anecdotes, character sketches, and memories of Steinbeck and the people with whom he shared his life wives...