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.
