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...

Gordon Weaver is known well throughout the world of American letters. Since the publication in 1968 of his first novel, Count a Lonely Cadence (produced as a feature film entitled Cadence), Weaver has gone on to publish seven collections of short fiction and three other novels and to edit or co-edit four critical works. His fiction has won O. Henry and Pushcart awards and appeared in many prestigious anthologies, such as Best American Short Stories and Best of the West. Weaver is also a poet of accomplishment, a fact known only by a few editors and by his former students, many of them now...

Told entirely from the point of view of Yosinori Yamaguchi, a Japanese honors student who excels in his study of English during the nineteen thirties and who is totally devoted to American film, the novel rollicks through Japanese-American history with an ironically detached account of one man's struggle to adhere to the philosophy of yoin ma do, which the narrator quickly translates into his pidgin Japanese-hipster English to mean. ..Go with do flow,"' meaning, as the story unfolds, to take life's ironies as they come.