Reading the Western Landscape Community Book Discussion

[W]e are thrown right into the action with no explanation of who anyone is or what exactly they are doing. The novel is a rollercoaster… And then book two starts and we find out how Dick and Nicole met. And it’s calm, beautiful reading that reminds us that those characters once had an easier and happier life. This is where Fitzgerald shines and really introduces you to the most beautiful sentences in literature. [The book]is not as accessible as The Great Gatsby, but once you break through, it’s also more beautiful. The story of a couple having and losing love is heartbreaking and Fitzgerald masters the language as no one else to tell this story.”— Emma Holtrust, The Beauty of Literature

Set in the south of France in the late 1920s, Tender Is the Night is the tragic tale of a young actress, Rosemary Hoyt, and her complicated relationship with the alluring American couple Dick and Nicole Diver. A brilliant psychiatrist at the time of his marriage, Dick is both husband and doctor to Nicole, whose wealth pushed him into a glamorous lifestyle, and whose growing strength highlights Dick’s decline. Lyrical, expansive, and hauntingly evocative, Tender Is the Night was one of the most talked-about books of the year when it was originally published in 1934, and is even more beloved by readers today.

…[This] should be added to this growing cannon of writing by women that reexamines women’s relationship to nature…[T]he … protagonists are not so much struggling against nature as coming to terms with the possibility that their fundamental humanness is inseparable from the … the natural world. T]he collection pivot[s] on misperception, both of self & of others, & on betrayals, some purposeful, some accidental…[She] … reveals the interior mechanisms, the psyches, that drive her … protagonists to make the choices they do. [S]he … creates characters whose personalities & choices seem at once very human & clearly woven into the fabric of a larger natural order…[and] … are always gripping, near perfect in their construction, and often wondrous..”— Hasanthika Sirisena, Fiction Writers Review

From a lightning death on an isolated peak to the intrigues of a small town orchestra, the glimmering stories in this debut collection explore how nature–damaged, fierce, and unpredictable–worms its way into our lives. Here moths steal babies, a creek seduces a lonely suburban mother, and the priorities of a passionate conservationist are thrown into confusion after the death of her son. Over and over, the natural world reveals itself to be unknowable, especially to the people who study it most. These tales of scientists, nurses, and firefighters catalog the loneliness within families, betrayals between friends, and the recurring song of regret and grief.

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“[…]Its ambition is evident in the apparent humility of its subject: […] it’s to be nothing more or less than the story of a life. And there is something in even those first paragraphs, an un-show-off-y assurance in the prose, like the soft opening notes of a virtuoso or the first casual gestures of a master artist, that tells us we are in the presence not just of a great writer but of something more—someone who knows life, who maybe even understands it[…;]the presence of wisdom. And wisdom is, of course, perennially out of style”.–Tim Kreider, The New Yorker

Discover an American masterpiece. This unassuming story about the life of a quiet English professor has earned the admiration of readers all over the globe.   William Stoner is born at the end of the nineteenth century into a dirt-poor Missouri farming family. Sent to the state university to study agronomy, he instead falls in love with English literature and embraces a scholar’s life, so different from the hardscrabble existence he has known. And yet as the years pass, Stoner encounters a succession of disappointments: marriage into a “proper” family estranges him from his parents; his career is stymied; his wife and daughter turn coldly away from him; a transforming experience of new love ends under threat of scandal. Driven ever deeper within himself, Stoner rediscovers the stoic silence of his forebears and confronts an essential solitude.   John Williams’s luminous and deeply moving novel is a work of quiet perfection. William Stoner emerges from it not only as an archetypal American, but as an unlikely existential hero, standing, like a figure in a painting by Edward Hopper, in stark relief against an unforgiving world.

“Taylor is an expert at concentration; rarely deterred, though heavyhearted in her pursuit of truth, her poems are precise, crisp. “Normalcy devastates. Stillness lies to me,” she writes as the author is once again reminded, and here to remind us how purposefully memory can be erased, the way life goes on despite its wounds, that we are just filling the holes with sand until once again, it erodes. Concentrate begs us to do just that for our insured survival.”– Ashia Ajani, Split Lip Magazine

Winner of the 2021 Cave Canem Poetry Prize, selected by Rachel Eliza Griffiths In her virtuosic debut, Courtney Faye Taylor explores the under-told history of the murder of Latasha Harlins–a fifteen-year-old Black girl killed by a Korean shop owner, Soon Ja Du, after being falsely accused of shoplifting a bottle of orange juice. Harlins’s murder and the following trial, which resulted in no prison time for Du, were inciting incidents of the 1992 Los Angeles uprising, and came to exemplify the long-fraught relationship between Black and Asian American communities in the United States. Through a collage-like approach to collective history and storytelling, Taylor’s poems present a profound look into the insidious points at which violence originates against–and between–women of color. Concentrate displays an astounding breadth of form and experimentation in found texts, micro-essays, and visual poems, merging worlds and bending time in order to interrogate inexorable encounters with American patriarchy and White supremacy manifested as sexual and racially charged violence. These poems demand absolute focus on Black womanhood’s relentless refusal to be unseen, even and especially when such luminosity exposes an exceptional vulnerability to harm and erasure. Taylor’s inventive, intimate book radically reconsiders the cost of memory, forging a path to a future rooted in solidarity and possibility. “Concentrate,” she writes. “We have decisions to make. Fire is that decision to make.”

Sanora Babb experienced pioneer life in a one-room dugout, eye-level with the land that supported, tormented and beguiled her; where her family fought for their lives against drought, crop-failure, starvation, and almost unfathomless loneliness. Learning to read from newspapers that lined the dugouts dirt walls, she grew up to be a journalist, then a writer of unforgettable books about the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl, most notably Whose Names Are Unknown. This evocative memoir of a pioneer childhood on the Great Plains is written with the lyricism and sensitivity that distinguishes all of Sanora Babb’s writing. What this true story of Sanora’s prairie childhood reveals best are the values courage, pride, determination, and love that allowed her family to prevail over total despair.

This long, out-of-print memoir is reissued with new acclaim: “On a par stylistically and thematically with Willa Cather’s My Antonia, this is a classic that deserves to be rediscovered and cherished for years to come.” Linda Miller, English Professor at Penn State.

“An unsung masterpiece in the field of American autobiography. Arnold Rampersad, author of Ralph Ellison: A Biography.

Editorial Reviews “A wry, affectionate but unsentimental recall of frontiering struggles in Colorado just prior to WWI.”–Kirkus

“Babbs engaging memoir recalls a childhood spent on the harsh and wild Colorado frontier during the early 1900s.” —Publishers Weekly

“Babbs memories of her childhood in eastern Colorado before World War I. . .relating vividly and with fine and fond recollection”–Library Journal

[The author] is a notable W[estern] A[ustralia] broadcaster and author who has specialised in local, particularly Indigenous, histories since the 1980s. In [the book], Bunbury examines the ways European settlement has shaped Southwest Australia, a biodiversity hotspot of rivers, forests and coastal plains. Bunbury contributes to the complex narratives of the environment since European settlement through extensive oral histories[…] [I]ntroductory and concluding chapters, which give a broader historical context [and], four case studies each detail one particular environmental change[…] As Bunbury notes in the introduction, the book is written in a style reminiscent of a radio script, with long quotes from his sources interspaced with his own sparse narration…–Brad Jefferies, Books+Publishing

When Europeans first settled in Australia, the land withheld many of its secrets from them. There were broad rivers, wide plains and tall forests, all of which, to European eyes, suggested promising sites for settlement. To many of the new settlers, the First Australians were a puzzle. They moved freely through country they knew intimately. They had useful things to say to the European newcomers – if they would listen. What few realised then was that Aboriginal people, and the land they lived in, were indistinguishable. Failure to read the people made it hard to read the country. Invisible Country describes the environmental change that has occurred in south-western Australia since European settlement, through four case studies of the development of local rivers, forests and coastal plains. These stories, compiled through extensive conversations with farmers, ecologists, traditional owners and others who rely on the land, are book-ended by an examination of the historical perspective in which these changes have occurred. It is a reminder that the land owns people, not the other way around, and is the beginning of a conversation about understanding and care for a land we are all lucky to live in.