Memory s deposit is my only asset now, says the narrator of Miles Wilson s wrenching poetry collection. These are fiercely honest poems about how a man s life can meander through pain and indiscretion, anger and bitterness; how it can express itself in rage and pungent wit and find a kind of healing in the natural world of mountains and trout streams. Wilson s meditations range from the perils of a firefighter s life in the forests of the West to the domestic agonies of a marriage gone wrong, to the resonances between wild nature and the flawed human spirit, and to the wisdom found in the...

Unfolding from the bygone era of 1950s Las Vegas through the turbulent decades that followed, this epic novel examines the universal search for identity and reward in a world where the good life always seems out of reach. Suppose that the Great Gatsby had raised a foster son, and further suppose that that son was raised in the casinos of Las Vegas and the open spaces of Montana: Here we would have the protagonist of H. Lee Barnes's wonderful novel of loyalty, heartbreak, and redemption. - Mary Clearman Blew, author of All But the Waltz The streets of early Las Vegas are a tough place for a...

Las Vegas holds a unique place in the popular imagination and in the work of any number of contemporary writers of fiction. The fourteen stories in this anthology explore the multifarious personalities of America s Sin City through the experiences of the dreamers and gamblers, the losers and the lost, who inhabit Las Vegas and confront its myriad attractions and disappointments."

This edition of Walter Van Tilburg Clark s collection of short stories which includes Hook, Clark s most renowned story makes these pieces available again to a new generation of readers.

Critic John R. Milton once said that Walter Van Tilburg Clark "did perhaps more than anyone else to define (in his fiction) the mode of perception, the acquisition of knowledge, and the style which we tend to call Western." In 1950, Walter Van Tilburg Clark, author of the acclaimed novelThe Ox-Bow Incident, published a collection of short stories that had already won distinction in various national...

Thirteen-year-old Matt Echbar is angry at the world. His widowed father is too busy for him, and his grandfather is an embarrassment, an unschooled Basque shepherd whose language and customs are completely alien to Matt's all-American lifestyle. And things get worse when the grandfather steals a flock of sheep and dragoons Matt into helping him drive them to a secret camp in the Arizona mountains. The ensuing adventure is one of the most compelling and delightful coming-of-age novels in recent fiction. the flock across the burgeoning suburbs of Phoenix and into the remote mountains, the boy...

The literary image of Los Angeles has evolved since the 1880s from promotional literature that hyped the region as a New Eden to contemporary visions of the city as a perplexing, sometimes corrupt, even apocalyptic place that reflects all that is wrong with America. InImagining Los Angeles, the first literary history of the city in more than fifty years, critic David Fine traces the history and mood of the place through the work of writers as diverse as Helen Hunt Jackson, Mary Austin, Norman Mailer, Raymond Chandler, Joan Didion, Carolyn See, and many others. His lively and engaging...

This engrossing new novel by acclaimed author Susan Lang continues the saga of Ruth Farley, the fiercely independent young woman who was the protagonist of Small Rocks Rising. Ruth is still on her homestead at the end of a rugged canyon in California's Mojave Desert, still struggling to survive on her own and to recover from a brutal rape and the murder of her lover. Now she must also face the responsibility of motherhood. The ensuing story expands Ruth's world to encompass the vast panorama of Depression-era Southern California--miners and ranchers striving to hang on until times are better;...

Walter Van Tilburg Clark, author of the classic novel The Ox-Bow Incident, was one of the most important writers of the twentieth century, who helped to change American literature by making the West and its vast, haunted landscapes a legitimate subject for serious fiction. But his career, which began so brilliantly, largely ended when he was still a comparatively young man, stifled by a paralyzing case of writer's block. Jackson J. Benson, one of the country's foremost literary biographers, has produced the first full-length biography of this brilliant, enigmatic figure, focusing on Clark's...