The ascetic and enigmatic expanse of the Great Basin has challenged the talents of many writer, but few have met the challenge as successfully as William L. Fox. In"Reading Sand, "Fox's elegant minimalist poems capture the essence of the Great Basin desert its daunting emptiness, the passage of light and wind across its surfaces, its colors and textures, its silence. In "perforated object," the collection's central piece, Fox uses a mysterious pierced-horn artifact discovered in Nevada's Humboldt Cave as the subject of an extended meditation on the nature of history and the inscrutability of...

In 1929, Ruth Farley, a fiercely independent woman, homesteads a tract of land in a beautiful canyon in the Southern California desert. Determined to live on her own terms and to be free of troubling human attachments, Ruth initially rejects the help of the miners and cowboys who are her neighbors and struggles to develop the homestead on her own. Gradually, however, Ruth learns that survival is a far more complicated and dangerous business, and the entrapments of love sweeter, and more binding, than she had ever imagined. Determined to take possession of her land, Ruth must first face the...

In her first full-length poetry collection, Catherine French reveals a curiosity about the complexities of the quotidian and a keen sensitivity to the strangeness and magic that lie within all our human experiences, from learning the shapes of the alphabet, realizing how they failed in that attempt to join / the physical and abstract, how each sound / fell short of the world, to watching the death of a horse, its beauty sent back / through the long funnel / to abstraction.

These are poems of rich imagery and profound psychological insight, of wry ironies and compelling truths. French is a...

Nevada's back country is a region of drought-parched sagebrush and snow-clogged winters, rugged ranchers and fiercely independent loners seeking solitude in remote canyons. But the Nevada of Art Gibney's superb new story collection is part of the modern West, where traditional ways collide uneasily with apocalyptic technologies, ranchers contend with BLM bureaucrats about the use of the land, downwinders die of horrible malignancies, and no canyon is inviolate to the ubiquitous military presence. Gibney vividly captures the tensions of the contemporary rural West of ranchers struggling to...

"Why I Lie"tells the painful and hilarious story of a down home Arkansas boy's efforts to make good. Jack Smith, the protagonist of this story cycle, is an unwilling ne'er-do-well, from "people who ate roadkill, whose hearts got broken early on and stayed that way," for whom "being poor was a way of thinking, a mindset you couldn't outrun with a suitcase full of money." The ten stories in this powerful collection trace Jack's ongoing attempts to outrun the violence and tragedy of his past and create a viable life despite a native state that often traps its rural poor. The road to Jack's...

Ann Ronald found a career and a home when she moved to Reno to teach at the University of Nevada. There, she undertook the study of the literature of the West and discovered that the region's vast open spaces satisfied her zest for the outdoors. The essays collected in Reader of the Purple Sage reflect Ronald's wide-ranging interests. Here are highly informative, and deeply informed, critical essays on writers as diverse as Zane Grey, Edward Abbey, Wallace Stegner, and Terry Tempest Williams, as well as the Tonopah Ladies - a group of literary women who found their voices in the unlikely...

The American conquest of California is the subject of Lawrence Coates's remarkable new novel, a tale rich in magical irony, fraught with caustic truths and wrenching insights into the human condition. When Commodore Thomas Jones and the crew of the National Intention land in Monterey believing themselves to be bringing freedom and democracy to the benighted Californios, they discover that history has preceded them, that cruelty, betrayal, greed, and lust are already well established there, and that far from existing outside of history, California is a battleground for several contending...

For several generations, Katharine Haake's family has been intimately linked with the landscape and history of far-northern California. In That Water, Those Rocks, she offers a brilliant novel that interlaces autobiographical writing, natural history, and reflections on the craft of writing itself. Shasta Dam, the graceful, curved centerpiece of California's Central Valley Project, lies at the heart of this multi-layered work. The dam's construction, and the impact of its presence, becomes the obsession and occupation for all of Haake's characters. Containing and controlling the water of...

The Chicano characters in Richard Yanez's debut story collection live in El Paso's Lower Valley but inhabit a number of borders-between two countries, two languages, and two cultures, between childhood and manhood, life and death. The teenaged narrator of Desert Vista copes with a new school and a first love while negotiating the boundaries between his family's tenuous middle-class status and the working-class community in which they have come to live. Tony Amoroza, the protagonist of Amoroza Tires, wrestles with the overwhelming grief from his wife's death until an unexpected legacy prompts...

Brian Young is the creator of powerful, sometimes harsh poems that combine outrage with lyricism, brooding melancholy with rich, sensual, even playful language. Young s work is difficult, in the sense that it rejects reductive prettiness, and at times threatening and full of moral anger against whatever is toxic in our environment and our culture. Yet it is never less than compelling in the wealth of its imagery and the force of Young s original voice. This is poetry for a new millennium, poetry that dares to look at what is ugly and frightening in our contemporary world, while still...