Description

This curated collection of 12 books by Wyoming and western authors spans the genres and offers something for anyone who loves a good story told well.

In nonfiction, philosopher and scientist Jeffrey Lockwood looks at the influence of the energy industry on free speech in Wyoming in Behind the Carbon Curtain, while naturalist Gary Ferguson explores the new realities of wildlife in the west in Land on Fire. Archaeologist Robert Kelly considers how the study of our cultural past can predict the future of humanity in The Fifth Beginning: What Six Million Years of Human History Can Tell Us About Our Future. And memoirist Mary Beth Baptiste rounds out the genre with her tale of coming west, Altitude Adjustment: A Quest For Love, Home, and Meaning in the Tetons—a finalist for the Women Writing the West Willa Award.

Laramie-based novelist Alyson Hagy offers three powerful works of fiction, all set against the sometimes-lonesome backdrop of Wyoming’s wide-open landscapes: Boleto, a novel that Publishers Weekly called a “beautiful tale of redemption and perseverance” and which was a finalist of the Reading the West Award for Fiction; Ghosts of Wyoming, a collection of stories about “the hardscrabble lives and terrain of the least-populous state;” and Snow, Ashes, a novel that’s been called “a gripping portrait of a long friendship that endures the hard life of Wyoming sheep ranching and the trenches of the Korean War.” Also based in Laramie, novelist Brad Watson—whom the New York Times calls “a writer of profound depths”—offers Miss Jane, a complex and dramatic novel that was long-listed for the National Book Award for Fiction.

There’s also Nina McConigley’s debut story collection, Cowboys and East Indians, a finalist for the High Plains Books Award and the winner of the PEN Open Book Award. Set in Wyoming and India, McConigley’s stories explore the immigrant experience and collisions of cultures in the American West as seen through the eyes of outsiders. Also examining the experience of outsiders is former Wyoming poet laureate (and accordionist for the Buffalo-based band The Fireants) David Romtvedt, with his novel Zelestina Urza in Outer Space. The story of a sixteen-year-old Basque immigrant in Wyoming and her close friend Yellow Bird Daughter—a young Cheyenne Arapaho woman—this book is a piercing look at the American West of the 20th century, as told by two women far outside the traditional narrative of Manifest Destiny. And from bestselling writer Alexandra Fuller, author of the memoir Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight, comes the debut novel Quiet Until the Thaw, which follows the lives of two Oglala Sioux cousins who grow up to take two very different paths. This is a first edition.

Finally, in his newest poetry collection, Dilemmas of the Angels (which includes a poem featured on Garrison Keillor’s Writer’s Almanac earlier this year), David Romtvedt offers “a meditation on the ever-present need to balance our exterior life with our spiritual one.” Poet Carolyn Forche’ calls it “a work for our times.”

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