Buffalo Cactus and Other New Stories from the Southwest

Buffalo Cactus and Other New Stories from the Southwest
Author: D. Seth Horton
Publisher: University of New Mexico Press
Total Pages: 291
Release: 2018-03-15
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0826357555

Revealing the Southwest as home to some of the most entertaining writers in twenty-first century fiction, this collection features a wonderfully diverse array of authors, including Alberto Álvaro Ríos, Ron Carlson, José Skinner, Tacey M. Atsitty, and Kirstin Valdez Quade.

The Baby Train and Other Lusty Urban Legends

The Baby Train and Other Lusty Urban Legends
Author: Jan Harold Brunvand
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Total Pages: 370
Release: 1994-10-17
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0393312089

America's foremost folk-detective is back, sniffing out those zany but dubious stories that "really happened" to your sister's boyfriend's accountant. Here, Brunvand tracks the tales making today's dinner party circuit - tales such as "The Body in the Bed"

Dictionary of the American West

Dictionary of the American West
Author: Win Blevins
Publisher: Texas A&M University Press
Total Pages: 516
Release: 2008-08-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 0875654835

Did you ever need to spell “dogie” (as in, get-along-little), or need to know what a “sakey” is? This is the book that can tell you how to spell, pronounce, and define over 5,000 terms relative to the American West. Want to know what a “breachy” cow is? Turn to page 43 to learn that it’s an adjective used to describe a cow that has a tendency to find her way through fences where she isn’t supposed to be. Describes some teenagers we know… Spend hours perusing the dictionary at random, or read straight through to give you a flavor of the West from its beginnings to contemporary days. Laced with photographs and maps, the Dictionary of the American West will make you sound like an expert on all things Western, even if you don’t know your dingus from a dinner plate. Compiled of words brought into English from Native Americans, emigrants, Mormons, Hispanics, migrant workers, loggers, and fur trappers, the dictionary opens up history and culture in an enchanting way. From “Aarigaa!” to “zopilote,” the Dictionary of the American West is a “valuable book, a treasure for any literate American’s library.” (Tony Hillerman)

The Best Peace Fiction

The Best Peace Fiction
Author: Robert Olen Butler
Publisher: University of New Mexico Press
Total Pages: 224
Release: 2021-09-15
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0826363032

Named Peacemaker of the Year in the 2022 Independent Publisher (IPPY) Book Awards In the first anthology of its kind, Robert Olen Butler and Phong Nguyen assemble an astounding collection of stories that cause readers to contemplate war, peace, and social justice in a new light. The fourteen stories featured in this volume explore the varied and often unexpected outcomes of violence. The authors explore the tragedies that occur closer to home--not on military battlefields but rather in places that are never meant to be battlefields, like schools and churches. The fiction reveals the violence that renders our most sacred and seemingly safest of places vulnerable. Not a utopian project, this book asks whether literature has a role in furthering the ongoing pursuit of peace and justice for all. While exploring tragedy, these stories also offer hope for healing, illuminating how people can move forward from the moments when their lives change and how they can regain and reshape safe spaces to find solace.

We Fed Them Cactus

We Fed Them Cactus
Author: Fabiola Cabeza de Baca Gilbert
Publisher: UNM Press
Total Pages: 228
Release: 1994
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 9780826315038

Documents the daily activities of Hispanic pioneers--buffalo hunting, horse breaking, sheep herding, preparing and preserving food, sewing, tending the sick, and educating children are included in this rich recuerdo, as well as stories of Comancheros, Tejanos, Americanos, and outlaws.

Frederic Remington’s Own West

Frederic Remington’s Own West
Author: Frederic Remington
Publisher: Pickle Partners Publishing
Total Pages: 438
Release: 2015-11-06
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 178625445X

A collection of Frederic Remington’s writings, complemented by more than one hundred of his famous drawings, provides an exciting record of the Old West as it once was, with tales of cowboys, Indians, and soldiers.

Fire from the Andes

Fire from the Andes
Author: Susan Elizabeth Benner
Publisher: UNM Press
Total Pages: 212
Release: 1998
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 9780826318251

South American women authors look at the female experience.

The Red Caddy

The Red Caddy
Author: Charles Bowden
Publisher: University of Texas Press
Total Pages: 120
Release: 2018-04-25
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1477315799

A passionate advocate for preserving wilderness and fighting the bureaucratic and business forces that would destroy it, Edward Abbey (1927–1989) wrote fierce, polemical books such as Desert Solitaire and The Monkey Wrench Gang that continue to inspire environmental activists. In this eloquent memoir, his friend and fellow desert rat Charles Bowden reflects on Abbey the man and the writer, offering up thought-provoking, contrarian views of the writing life, literary reputations, and the perverse need of critics to sum up “what he really meant and whether any of it was truly up to snuff.” The Red Caddy is the first literary biography of Abbey in a generation. Refusing to turn him into a desert guru, Bowden instead recalls the wild man in a red Cadillac convertible for whom liberty was life. He describes how Desert Solitaire paradoxically “launched thousands of maniacs into the empty ground” that Abbey wanted to protect, while sealing his literary reputation and overshadowing the novels that Abbey considered his best books. Bowden also skewers the cottage industry that has grown up around Abbey’s writing, smoothing off its rougher (racist, sexist) edges while seeking “anecdotes, little intimacies . . . pieces of the True Beer Can or True Old Pickup Truck.” Asserting that the real essence of Abbey will always remain unknown and unknowable, The Red Caddy still catches gleams of “the fire that from time to time causes a life to become a conflagration.”

A Land Apart

A Land Apart
Author: Flannery Burke
Publisher: University of Arizona Press
Total Pages: 425
Release: 2017-05-02
Genre: History
ISBN: 081653618X

Winner, Spur Award for Best Contemporary Nonfiction (Western Writers of America) A Land Apart is not just a cultural history of the modern Southwest—it is a complete rethinking and recentering of the key players and primary events marking the Southwest in the twentieth century. Historian Flannery Burke emphasizes how indigenous, Hispanic, and other non-white people negotiated their rightful place in the Southwest. Readers visit the region’s top tourist attractions and find out how they got there, listen to the debates of Native people as they sought to establish independence for themselves in the modern United States, and ponder the significance of the U.S.-Mexico border in a place that used to be Mexico. Burke emphasizes policy over politicians, communities over individuals, and stories over simple narratives. Burke argues that the Southwest’s reputation as a region on the margins of the nation has caused many of its problems in the twentieth century. She proposes that, as they consider the future, Americans should view New Mexico and Arizona as close neighbors rather than distant siblings, pay attention to the region’s history as Mexican and indigenous space, bear witness to the area’s inequalities, and listen to the Southwest’s stories. Burke explains that two core parts of southwestern history are the development of the nuclear bomb and subsequent uranium mining, and she maintains that these are not merely a critical facet in the history of World War II and the militarization of the American West but central to an understanding of the region’s energy future, its environmental health, and southwesterners’ conception of home. Burke masterfully crafts an engaging and accessible history that will interest historians and lay readers alike. It is for anyone interested in using the past to understand the present and the future of not only the region but the nation as a whole.