Product Description

The Real Western Canon

Larry McMurtry, the preeminent chronicler of the American West, celebrates the best of contemporary Western short fiction, introducing a stellar collection of twenty stories that represent, in various ways, the coming-of-age of the legendary American frontier.

Featuring a veritable Who's Who of the century's most distinctive writers, this collection effectively departs from the standard superstars of the Western genre. McMurtry has chosen a refreshing range of work that, when taken as a whole, depicts the evolution and maturation of Western writing over several decades. The featured tales are not so concerned with the American West of history and geography as they are with the American West of the imagination -- one that is alternately comic, gritty, individual, searing, and complex.

Contributors

Wallace Stegner * Dave Hickey * Dao Strom * Dagoberto Gilb * William Hauptman * Jack Kerouac * Ron Hansen * Diana Ossana * Robert Boswell * Tom McGuane Louise Erdrich * Max Apple * Mark Jude Poirier * Rick Bass * Jon Billman * Richard Ford * Raymond Carver * Annie Proulx * Leslie Marmon Silko * William H. Gass

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #709106 in Books
• Published on: 2001-06-05
• Released on: 2001-06-05
• Original language: English
• Dimensions: .91" h x 5.27" w x 8.02" l, .96 pounds
• Binding: Paperback
• 416 pages

From Amazon.com
In Still Wild: Short Fiction of the American West, 1950 to the Present, Larry McMurtry gives us a depleted West. The West of McMurtry's own writing is wildly various, filled with dead ends and bright ideas, lonesome cowboys and garrulous socialites. In the 20 stories he's chosen for this anthology, it is instead an undifferentiated territory of losers: you've got your sad sacks, your screwups, your lost souls. The lucky have all gone to live somewhere else.

In any anthology, there is usually one story that rolls up its sleeves and clobbers all the others. Here it is Annie Proulx's haunting "Brokeback Mountain," the secret history of two male ranch workers who fall in love and carry on a life-long affair. Her opener also happens to give a perfect view of the landscape found in this collection: "They were raised on small, poor ranches in opposite corners of the state, Jack Twist in Lightning Flat, up on the Montana border, Ennis del Mar from around Sage, near the Utah line, both high-school drop-out country boys with no prospects, brought up to hard work and privation, both rough-mannered, rough-spoken, inured to the stoic life."

Sometimes the poverty is slicked up with romance, as in Jack Kerouac's "The Mexican Girl," a lightning-hot excerpt from On the Road: "Terry and Raymond sat in the grass; we had grapes. In California you chew the juice out of the grapes and spit the skin and pits away, the gist of the grape is always wine. Nightfall came. Terry went home for supper and came to the barn at nine o'clock with my secret supper of delicious tortillas and mashed beans. I lit a wood fire on the cement floor of the barn to make light. We made love on the crates." We read of Wallace Stegner's Saskatchewan, Richard Ford's Wyoming, Mark Jude Poirier's suburban Tucson. Each story thoughtfully renders disappointment. Proulx's Jack Twist says it best: "Nothin never come to my hand the right way." The writing is above reproach, the stories are compelling, but by the end of the book they seem to be all the same story. Surely the West is bigger than this. --Claire Dederer

From Library Journal
No, not Louis L'Amour, but 20 tales of the West from the likes of Richard Ford, Raymond Carver, Leslie Marmon Silko, and Jack Kerouac.
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Kirkus Reviews
The severities of pioneer life yield up no Prousts, novelist McMurtry observes in his terse introduction to this varied gathering of short fiction by contemporary writers who at one point or another in their careers have taken as their subject life in the American West. His point about pioneer life is that until recently most of those who wrote about the West were outsiders, not the native-born, and they wrote about a West filtered through their romantic or ideological notions of what it was. Not until the 1950s did significant numbers of writers, either born in the West or longtime residents, begin to deal with its complex history and somewhat grim present. Wallace Stegner, a founding father of the modern western tradition, is necessarily present (Buglesong). Some of the other choices are also necessary if unsurprising: Tom McGuane (Dogs); Richard Ford (Rock Springs); and William H. Gass (a classic tale, The Pedersen Kid). William Hauptman (the wonderful Good Rockin' Tonight), Rick Bass (Mahatma Joe, one of his most precise and effective stories), Annie Proulx (Brokeback Mountain), and Raymond Carver (The Third Thing That Killed My Father) are among the other well-known figures here. Dagoberto Gilb, Louise Erdrich, and Leslie Marmon Silko stand in as representatives of the upsurge in western fiction being produced by Hispanic and Native American writers. And several less well-known authors (Dave Hickey, Mark Jude Poirier, and Jon Bllman) indicate the still-vibrant nature of the tradition.A useful survey, and a nicely varied compendium of vigorous tales. -- Copyright © 2000 Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.