"Higher Elevations: Stories from the West" is a rich and varied anthology of fiction from "Writers' Forum." As the subtitle promises, it is regional, but these are not all stories from your grandfather's (or Hollywood's) West. These are rodeos and forest fires, lonely farmhouses, and isolated lives in wide open spaces, but there are also stories of the urban homeless, of teenage girls in the club and drug scene of present-day Austin, of wetbacks, Vietnamese immigrants, literate writers of advertising commercials living in high-rise flats. There are action stories and stories of local color,...