Product Description

A superb collection of stories—his first in twenty years—from one of our most acclaimed literary figures, whom The New York Times Book Review has called “a writer of the first magnitude.”

            Place exerts the power of destiny in these ten stories of lives uncannily recognizable and unforgettably strange:  a boy makes a surprising discovery skating at night on Lake Michigan; an Irish clan in Massachusetts gather at the bedside of their dying matriarch; a battered survivor of the glory days of Key West washes up on other shores. Several of the stories unfold in Big Sky country, McGuane’s signature landscape:  a father tries to buy his adult son out of virginity; a convict turned cowhand finds refuge at a ranch in ruination; a couple makes a fateful drive through the perilous gorge of the title story before parting ways. McGuane’s people are seekers, beguiled by the land’s beauty and myth, compelled by the fantasy of what a locale can offer, forced to reconcile dream and truth.

The stories of Gallatin Canyon are alternately comical, dark, and poignant. Rich in the wit, compassion, and matchless language for which McGuane is celebrated, they are the work of a master.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #643805 in Books
• Published on: 2006-07-04
• Released on: 2006-07-04
• Format: Deckle Edge
• Original language: English
• Dimensions: 8.65" h x .97" w x 6.03" l, .92 pounds
• Binding: Hardcover
• 240 pages

From Publishers Weekly
McGuane returns to the territories of his novels (Some Horses, etc.) in this collection of stories set in Montana, Michigan and Florida. Most of the characters are older, divorced and still looking for attachment but without much hope of love. They are alcoholics (in "Vicious Circle" and "The Refugee"), junkies ("Northcoast"), low-grade ex-cons ("The Cowboy"), embezzlers ("Old Friends"), disconnected fathers ("The Zombie" and "Aliens") and lackluster ordinary men. In the title story, an unnamed smalltimer sets out on a business trip down the winding Gallatin Canyon, Mont., road with his girlfriend, Louise. He conducts his business dealings with phony bluster and indecision, humiliating himself in the eyes of this woman he hopes to marry; things get worse from there. Any attempts these characters make to draw happiness back into their lives backfires clumsily, pushing it further from their grasp. McGuane's sentences still have a playful quality, but the prevailing dreariness ("I wish I could feel something," exclaims Louise) is something other than inspiring. (July 11)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist
*Starred Review* Gallatin Canyon is a narrow passage along a river in Idaho threaded with a heavily traveled highway. It can be a trap, which is the overarching metaphor in this collection of 10 finely chiseled short stories. McGuane, the author of nine novels, is prized for his uncanny knack for uniting flinty humor (aimed most often at male bewilderment) with classic landscape-inspired American lyricism, and he writes with particular intensity in these initially measured, then increasingly feverish, tales of odd encounters and doomed pairings, of men returning to their roots or heading for the hills. In "Ice," a teenager risks his life skating far out onto Lake Ontario in the dark. In "The Refugee," a spectacular story destined for a "best of" volume, a man suicidal with guilt sails the Caribbean, weathering monstrous storms and seeking absolution. Puzzlelike and peopled with cowboys, lawyers, junkies, and drunks, McGuane's virtuoso tales are studies in helplessness and withholding as men try to take control of themselves and their situations and instead are carried along on the great surging current of life, battered by other people's woes, tangled up in their own failings, and enraptured by the earth's grandeur. Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Review
“Astonishing . . . McGuane has become our poet-philosopher of the arm’s length . . . A writer [who] knows something about writing, real writing . . . words as access to the soul . . . McGuane has driven so hard into the heart of a received wisdom concerning American manhood, otherwise known as American loneliness, that he has broken through to the other side.”
–Stephen Metcalf, New York Times Book Review

“Dazzling . . . Classic McGuane, packed with emotionally wayward characters following dark, twisted paths where chance occurrences, strange coincidences and surprising bursts of humor wait in dark corners with clenched fists.”
–Steven Rinella, Outside

“Some moments in these tales are simply breathtaking.”
–Jacqueline Blais, USA Today

“One of our country’s finest prosemakers . . . You hear the name Thomas McGuane and you think of Montana’s big sky, beneath which cavort and limp and love and lament that peculiar breed of folks we call Westerners, who, by the time we finish reading about them, we think of as our cousins, wherever any of us may live.”
–Alan Cheuse, San Francisco Chronicle

“McGuane is a master . . . You can’t force this kind of writing.”
–Susan Salter Reynolds, Los Angeles Times

“There are good writers and there are very good writers and then there are a few very very good writers. Thomas McGuane is a very very good writer . . . Buy this book.”
–John Greenya, Washington Times

“One of the best story collections in a surprisingly robust field . . . McGuane is very much a serious writer and with these stories one to be taken seriously.”
–Robert Birnbaum, Denver Post

“With hints of Robert Stone and Joseph Conrad, McGuane crafts a moving account [that will] touch a nerve.”
–Bob Hoover, Pittsburg Post-Gazette

“Powerful stuff.”
–Pete Warzel, Rocky Mountain News

“Leaves the reader surprised and satisfied . . . McGuane navigates the human condition with skill and elegance.”
–Ginny Merdes, The Seattle Times

“Gallatin Canyon should start a storm of revival of the power of the short story. Tom McGuane is the most graceful, deepest-witted writer of his generation. These stories are gold in every sentence.”
–Barry Hannah, author of Airships