Customer Reviews

Still Wild: Short Fiction of the American West 1950 to the Present

5 star:		(7)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

I bought this book mainly because I'm curious about what's west of where I grew up: Wisconsin. What amazing writers are in this collection!!! All different points of view, but compelling and interesting. I especially liked Jon Billman and Diana Ossana's stories, two writers I'd not heard of. I hope to see more of their work. Who knows the west better than Mr. Lonesome Dove?! Buy it, read it, you won't be sorry.

I thought this collection had such a wonderful range of writing styles. Most collections are too much in the style of one person's taste, but this book is able to rise above that. McMurtry really knows how to cover all of the artistic styles out there. My favorite in here was the story by Mark Jude Poirier. He has a novel called Goats that just came out, which is definitely worth checking out. I also liked Diana Ossana's story in here.

"Still Wild" kicks ass. Those of us from the west think McMurty did an amazing job culling through countless stories to bring us the best in the west. From Poirier's Cul-de-sacs to Proulx's Brokeback Mountain, this collection of short fiction is a pleasure to read and well worth the cover price!

I bought this book hoping to find two or three stories to pique my interest, but read it cover to cover and was not at all disappointed. Intelligent, inspired, lively, entertaining, funny, sad--just like life. If you read McMurtry's own fiction and enjoy it, this is a must-read for you!!! At least five stars. Take a chance, you won't be disappointed....

Perhaps that grump from New York has never been to the West. The stories in this collection perfectly reflect life in the West as I (a Westerner) know it. From the magic of Rick Bass to the hard realism of Richard Ford, McMurtry has chosen well. Annie Proulx's "Brokeback Mountain" is a classic, a Western classic. New writers like Dao Strom and Mark Jude Poirier give the anthology a fresh feel.

Larry McMurtry's collection of short fiction represents the American West from a perspective that is often wonky and off-kilter. It suggests that the people in these stories could be found just about anywhere in the U.S. but their location in the vast, "still wild" region beyond the 100th meridian infuses their lives with a kind of remoteness, isolation, and melancholy. A Nebraska farm couple in Ron Hansen's "True Romance" finds their livestock the prey of something far more sinister than coyotes. A Texas truck driver has a career as an Elvis impersonator in William Hauptman's "Good Rockin' Tonight."

A Californian with a family of Vietnamese in-laws is accused by a neighbor of shooting his pit bull in Dao Strom's "Chickens." In New Mexico, a father and his soon-to-be-disillusioned teenage son hit the road to keep at least one step ahead of trouble in Robert Boswell's "Glissando." Meanwhile, an Indian baseball team with a one-armed pitcher goes on the road in the Dakotas during the worst years of the Dust Bowl in Jon Billman's "Indians." And there's Annie Proulx's story of those two Wyoming cowboys who find love on "Brokeback Mountain."

It's a fine, entertaining collection, though one might question the inclusion of excerpts from novels (Jack Kerouac and Louise Erdrich) and William Gass's novella "The Pedersen Kid," when there are so many other fine writers of short stories, Maile Meloy, David Long, William Kittredge, Sherman Alexie, and Adrian Louis to name a few. But this is a minor quibble in a volume that belongs on any shelf of literature of the American West.

"Still Wild" is perhaps the best compilation of modern Western short stories, and it's frequently used by universities as it best captures the wide diversity of today's Western United States and Canada's Prairie Provinces. The stories themselves speak of the West today, not the hoary old myths of Zane Grey and Louis L'Amour, but as seen from contemporary Western writers from the latter half of the 20th Century such as Dagoberto Gilb, Annie Proulx, Leslie Marmon Silko, Richard Ford, Wallace Stegner, and others. The common theme or thread amongst these stories is that these are all people who have come from somewhere else, looking for opportunities, a new start, or maybe a chance to leave and go somewhere else. Many of these stories focus around misfits, lost souls, and people facing the challenges of adapting and changing. Probably the best known short story in here is Annie Proulx's "Brokeback Mountain" which served as the basis for the movie of the same name.
The stories are varied and interesting, holding up better as isolated short stories rather than a comprehensive cohesive whole. I'd had this as an undergraduate in an Honors program and then again as a graduate student, so for me these stories are like old friends. Standout stories include Gilb's character study "Romero's Shirt", Stegner's "Buglesong", Mark Jude Poirier's "Cul-de-sacs", Rick Bass's "Mahatma Joe", and Richard Ford's "Rock Springs". All capture the insular and isolated nature of the West and the people who live there along with the mysterious and strange sway the West can have over people. Some of these stories provided laugh out loud funny moments and others made me ponder things quite deeply. It's a pretty rare book that can make you do both!

This collection of short stories, compiled and edited by author Larry McMurtry, is filled with a nice variety of writing styles and approaches to writing. An excellent balance of 1st person and 3rd person with an appropriate presentation of human emotion versus the challenges of life and nature make this volume a welcome inclusion to modern western libraries.

Yet, in many ways, although selecting stories for an edition such as this must be an arduous, difficult, but also rewarding task, it appears as though emphases were placed on the dark qualities of the west, the tragedies and the sadness. True that tragedy tends to be a more expressive emotion than joy, and despair makes for more depth of thought than happiness, yet the prevailing tone of the stories is one of inevitable human suffering with occasional light moments.

Aside from that quality, the stories were well-written, though-provoking tales by outstanding writers of today. Especially notable are the stories of Wallace Stegner, William Hauptman, and Annie Proulx of Brokeback Mountain fame. Each story has a unique, rugged individualistic element, representative of the west with its demands on the human spirit. One overriding theme of the book is the West's tendency to separate the strong from the weak, in a kind of unforgiving Darwinesque philosophy. Yet hidden within the pages, sometimes more overtly than at other times, is the human desire to protect the weak and find the good.

This book is a welcome addition to short story collections and worth reading by Western enthusiasts as well as those preferring shorter fiction than the novels generally found in the genre.

If you are searching for a good book about the West, then keep on looking. This book led me to believe that I would read some short stories dealing with the West, but really the only connection to the title of the book is that the stories take place in the West. I didn't overly enjoy any of the stories and as soon as I would start to become involved in one, it would end, leaving me extremely unsatisfied. I practically made myself finish reading this book because I had spent so much money on it.