Customer Reviews

Circle of Women: An Anthology of Contemporary Western Women Writers

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Barnes and Blew have assembled a landmark collection of powerful writing by a wide spectrum of western women. The poems, stories, and essays in this collection remain as timely and instructive and powerful as ever. If Penguin has let the book go out of stock--or worse, allows it to go out of print--then a pox on its house. Once upon a time, before bottom feeders made the bottom line preeminent, publishers kept books in print because they understood the value of continued availability to developing a readership. These days, it appears that the marketers of blue jeans and jelly beans are in charge--unbooked, unbookish, and--finally--bad for business.

Find this book if you can. It will be one you cherish.

I had to buy a copy of this book for a lit. class while at the University of Nevada, Reno in Spring 1995. I didn't bother to read it through until that summer while working as a fledgling journalist in Owens Valley, California.

I've read it three times since. This is, hands down, one of the best short story anthologies I've ever read. It's doubly tragic that it's out of print and it's probably been stereotyped as "feminist" and/or "women's literature" because really these stories belong to everybody.

If you ever struggled to survive dirt poor in a Western town, these stories are for you. Leslie Ryan's "The Other Side of Fire" ought to be required reading in every high school from Montana to Arizona.