This Side of the Divide: Stories of the American West

by Tobias Wolff, Claire Vaye Watkins (Foreword by), Nona Caspers, Melinda Moustakis, Brian Evenson

Overview

From Baobab Press, in coordination with the University of Nevada, Reno’s Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing program, comes This Side of the Divide: Stories, the first anthology in a literary series attempting to capture the newness, vastness, territoriality and sense of transience alive in the American West.

Set west of the Continental Divide, these narratives skillfully demonstrate the beauty, austerity, and danger of the untouched wilderness, delight in the mutual ease and asphyxiation of the hyper-urban and chart the interstitial spaces of the developing and the abandoned. Inhabiting the West’s richly varied landscapes, the characters in these stories provide a glimpse of the social and cultural diversity on display in these regions. Among these 15 stories, gathered from rising literary voices, a single mother struggles to maintain her individuality while raising an autistic son; a cathartic hike brings an unsuspecting widow face-to-face with her own mortality; a man injured in a train wreck questions his existence as he blindly wanders the desert; an aging cowboy rides the highways astride his magnificent horse, a final remnant of a fleeting era; Sasquatch looks for love in all the wrong places; and a divorcee tries to reconcile her present with her past, her heart with her head.

Positioning the voices of emerging authors alongside acclaimed writers such as Tobias Wolff, Brian Evenson and Nona Caspers, these collected stories, at turns hilarious, frightening, and devastating, showcase the variety of identity, amalgam of voice and depth of character that make the American West such a truly brilliant, literary mosaic.

Contributors include Tobias Wolff, Maile Meloy, Brian Evenson, Melinda Moustakis, Nona Caspers, Douglas W. Milliken, David Gillette, Miranda Schmidt, Michelle Willms, Andrea Lani, Leah Griesmann, Vanessa Hua, Cathy Warner, Mark Maynard, Aharon Levy, Sian Griffiths, L.L. Madrid, Kirk Wilson, Ashley Davidson, Carl Beideman, E.G. Willy, Shelley Blanton-Stroud, and Linda Lenhoff.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781936097241
Publisher:	Baobab Press
Publication date:	02/12/2019
Pages:	380
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 8.90(h) x 1.10(d)
Age Range:	13 Years

About the Author

Baobab Press believes in the importance of collaboration between author and publisher. We seek to establish long-term relationships with our authors, providing them with the support necessary to see their works of art–no matter how divergent in content, style, and form–reach their fullest potential and widest readership. Our goal is to help our authors grow books that resonate today and will continue to be vital in the years to come.

Baobab Press shares the Levy Mansion with Sundance Books and Music, in Reno, Nevada. Our books are distributed by Publishers Group West.

Hometown:

Northern California

Date of Birth:

June 19, 1945

Place of Birth:

Birmingham, Alabama

Education:

B.A., Oxford University, 1972; M.A., Stanford University, 1975

Read an Excerpt

From "A Thirteenth Apostle’s Star" by Douglas W. Milliken

Once when he wasn’t much younger, Al learned amazement at the swift changes a body can undergo, often in such short periods of time. How could something so helpless and small develop strong arms, a broad chest? How could blind, blinking eyes ease into seeing? The infant in the pictures could not possibly be the man he’d become. In high school, he could swim faster than any of the other boys. He could dance with girls and make them want to touch him. How could he have once been something else?

Yet even after all possible advantages have been attained, the body continues to change. His hair began to fall out. His waist took on a shape that made his legs somehow bird-like and gawky in comparison. The flesh of his neck thickened in unintended ways. There was nothing he could do about any of this. He could still make women want to touch him, and the women did touch him still, but they were changed, too. It depressed him to realize that he and everyone was helpless and had been from the start. And if he could look at his own life as a series of incomprehensible and uncontrolled physical changes leading to his disappointing yet still capable middle-age, then what must this old woman feel as she rises and strides like some paralytic stork out from the dead or dying sunflowers and through the weeds to him, where her withered bone-trap hand takes his spotty and blood-smeared hand, where her myopic eyes squint at his bleeding brow as she asks him if he has something to do with that train wreck back over there?

Glancing over his shoulder, Al watches the black smoke billow and plume into the vapid blue. Blinks as the black expands, as the blue expands. Finally turns away.

“What train wreck?”

Table of Contents

Introduction - Claire Vaye Watkins

The Fifth Season - Nona Caspers
Graham Greene - Percival Everett
The Intricacies of Post-Shooting Etiquette - Brian Evenson
Miners and Trappers - Melinda Moustakis
Kite Whistler Aquamarine - Maile Meloy
That Room - Tobias Wolff
West of the Known - Chanelle Benz

A Thirteenth Apostle's Star - Douglas W. Milliken and drop - David Gillette
Aquarium - Miranda Schmidt
Old Car - Michelle Willms
Confluence - Andrea Lani
Desert Rats - Leah Griesmann
Harte Lake - Vanessa Hua
Impressions of a Family - Cathy Warner
Last Call at the Smokestack Club - Mark Maynard
Sasquatch Seeks a Mate - Aharon Levy
Sk8r - Sian Griffiths
The Casita on Flower Street - L.L. Madrid
The Goat's Eye - Kirk Wilsonv Thirst - Ashley Davidson
Upstream Vertigo - Carl Biedeman
Wagli Yelo - E.G. Willy
You Owe Me - Shelley Blanton-Stroud
Your Call is Important - Linda Lenhoff

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

Praise for Tobias Wolff's This Story Begins:

"Unforgettable…. Wolff's voice is unfailingly authentic, while his embrace of the variety of American experience is knowing, forgiving and all-encompassing." —The New York Times Book Review

Praise for Maile Meloy's Half in Love:

There are times when a writer nails a story the way a diver nails a dive....Half in Love offers up both plain speaking and mystery,subtlety and shock. That hole in the water marks where the final plunge of a story took your heart along with it." - The New York Times Book Review

Praise for Brian Evenson's A Collapse of Horses:

“Evenson’s fiction is equal parts obsessive, experimental, and violent. It can be soul-shaking.” —New Yorker

Praise for Melinda Moustakis's Bear Down, Bear North:

Moustakis allows readers to fully witness how experience―from a poverty that necessitates scavenging through the belongings of the dead to a younger sister’s beating―can shape lives without creating eternal victims. Burdens become gritty, matter-of-fact reminders that profound emotions often lie behind even the most unflinching exteriors. A welcome tribute to working class lives, Bear Down, Bear North is a debut of impressive voices in the wilderness. - ForeWord Reviews

Praise for Nona Caspers's Heavier Than Air:

"Revving up Willa Cather's naturalism and lesbian undertones with Denis Johnson's deadpan Plains rowdiness, these are like alt-country songs, tales of wild but not wild-eyed girls and women as likely to be enraptured by the girl next door as by the lay of the land. The prose is exact, unsparing, unsentimental. . . . Caspers' pungent voice, her fairness to city and country mores, and the artful arrangement of her tales reward rereading. Simplicity this precise takes time, talent and considerable cultivation."―San Francisco Chronicle