Still Wild, 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 American frontier.
Featuring a veritable Who's Who of the century's most distinctive writers, from Richard Ford, William H. Gass, and Raymond Carver to Leslie Marmon Silko, Louise Erdrich, and Annie Proulx, this collection effectively departs from the standard superstars of the Western genre. McMurtry has chosen a refreshing range of work that, when taken together, depicts the evolution and maturation of Western writing over several decades. Instead of the oft-anthologized adventures of Zane Grey, readers of Still Wild will encounter Jack Kerouac's extended love letter to Los Angeles, in "The Mexican Girl," and Wallace Stegner's haunting "Buglesong," with its disturbing evocation of the cruelty lurking beneath the West's beautiful landscape.
The tales featured 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. And indeed, Still Wild demonstrates all of these qualities.
