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

by Larry McMurtry

• ISBN13: 9780684868820
• ISBN10: 0684868822
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2000-07-10
• Publisher: Simon & Schuster

Summary

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.

Author Biography

Larry McMurtry, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, is the author, most recently, of Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen, as well as twenty-two novels, two collections of essays, a memoir, and more than thirty screenplays. He lives in Archer City, Texas.

Table of Contents

Introduction	11	(6)
Buglesong	17	(9)
Wallace Stegner
The Closed Season	26	(18)
Dave Hickey
Chickens	44	(21)
Dao Strom
Romero's Shirt	65	(8)
Dagoberto Gilb
Good Rockin' Tonight	73	(26)
William Hauptman
The Mexican Girl	99	(25)
Jack Kerouac
True Romance	124	(11)
Ron Hansen
White Line Fever	135	(22)
Diana Ossana
Glissando	157	(21)
Robert Boswell
Dogs	178	(6)
Tom McGuane
The Red Convertible	184	(12)
Louise Erdrich
Gas Stations	196	(7)
Max Apple
Cul-de-sacs	203	(16)
Mark Jude Poirier
Mahatma Joe	219	(35)
Rick Bass
Indians	254	(13)
Jon Billman
Rock Springs	267	(25)
Richard Ford
The Third Thing That Killed My Father Off	292	(13)
Raymond Carver
Brokeback Mountain	305	(29)
Annie Proulx
Lullaby	334	(11)
Leslie Marmon Silko
The Pedersen Kid	345
William H. Gass