- Paperback: 200 pages
- Publisher: Graywolf Press (Jun 10 2003)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 1555973841
- ISBN-13: 978-1555973841
- Product Dimensions: 21.8 x 13.5 x 1.8 cm
- Shipping Weight: 268 g
- Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (1 customer review)
- See Complete Table of Contents
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Product Details |
Product Description
From Booklist
Kittredge's memoirs of growing up on a cattle ranch in southeastern Oregon--Owning It All (1987) and Hole in the Sky (1992)--have become classics of western literature. His short fiction is lesser known, but this fine collection should help change that. The prose style is quintessentially western: no-nonsense declarative sentences, plainspoken, without artifice, yet expressing in their very simplicity the unspoken emotions that stand behind each syllable. Several of the stories, including "Be Careful What You Want," address themes familiar from the memoirs: disaffected children of wealthy western landowners dealing with their conflicted feelings about power and the land: "Every one of us has places to go sight-seeing in their own history." What Kittredge's people encounter in their sight-seeing is a chasm between the clarity of the natural world and the muck and mess of human relations. This universal dilemma is at the core of western literature, and Kittredge serves it straight up, free of the cliches of rugged individualism. His characters hurt one another with a kind of sad inevitability that makes their silence even more deafening. Bill Ott
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Review
“Kittredge’s stories—graceful, savvy, expansive, poignant, and sometimes even grave—tell us that it is our affections, not our courage or our toughness or our willingness to be unequivocal, that keeps us from one day to another. And that is a truth worth hearing. I only wish there were more of these stories.” —Richard Ford
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Customer Reviews
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Most helpful customer reviews
5.0 out of 5 stars
Stories from the Great Basin. . .,
By
This review is from: Best Short Stories Of William Kitteridge (Paperback)
This is a fine collection of stories set in the West by a man who grew up on a big family ranch in southern Oregon and eventually settled as a writer in western Montana. Kittredge is a promoter of other Western writers' talent, editing anthologies like "The Portable Western Reader" for Penguin and helping to bring to the screen a film version of Norman Maclean's "A River Runs Through It." In this collection of short stories, Kittredge reveals his own particular talents as a Western writer, drawing on his knowledge of rural and small town living in the Great Basin and Montana. His characters are genuine and deeply etched by the western code of individualism, self-sufficiency, and personal freedom. They are also haunted by the dark side of that code - isolation, loneliness, and restlessness.The men in these stories are strong and independent, both physically and emotionally. But they are not infallible. The women in their lives typically reveal to them things about themselves they'd rather not know. A man who hires a crop-duster to spray his land discovers that the pilot's command of an airplane excites wanderlust in the wife he thought he knew. A 34-year-old man, taking a wife and fathering a child, discovers that she was once the lover of his married brother. A man goes in hunt of a grizzly after the killing of a young woman camper, and in a chilling temptation of fate, puts his life in the hands of another woman to whom he has given his high-powered rifle. In other stories, a boy's idyllic life collapses into grief when his loving father dies while they are hunting geese in a frozen landscape. A combine operator harvests a field of wheat for a rancher and dies, his intestines perforated by a lifetime of hard work and hard knocks. A penniless cowboy works the ranch of a rich woman he has loved since she was a girl, knowing that "There is nothing to own but what you do." An old man's daughter is shot and killed, and the young man who first romanced her pays a call on her mourning father. The stories often deal with death or are about the defiance of death, and these themes seem to emerge from the landscape itself - remote, sparsely populated, given to extremes of heat and cold. The characters Kittredge creates are sharply drawn, and their speech is colorful and unschooled. Emotion surges beneath taciturn surfaces. There is tension in their unspoken desires, and for that reason the relationships between men and women are rarely untroubled. I highly recommend this collection of stories for readers interested in the West and the psychological impact of wide-open spaces and unsentimental lives. As a companion book, I'd also recommend Ralph Beer's terrific Montana novel, "The Blind Corral."
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta) Amazon.com:
4.3 out of 5 stars (3 customer reviews) 12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Stories from the Great Basin. . .,
By Ronald Scheer "rockysquirrel" - Published on Amazon.com
This review is from: Best Short Stories Of William Kitteridge (Paperback)
This is a fine collection of stories set in the West by a man who grew up on a big family ranch in southern Oregon and eventually settled as a writer in western Montana. Kittredge is a promoter of other Western writers' talent, editing anthologies like "The Portable Western Reader" for Penguin and helping to bring to the screen a film version of Norman Maclean's "A River Runs Through It." In this collection of short stories, Kittredge reveals his own particular talents as a Western writer, drawing on his knowledge of rural and small town living in the Great Basin and Montana. His characters are genuine and deeply etched by the western code of individualism, self-sufficiency, and personal freedom. They are also haunted by the dark side of that code - isolation, loneliness, and restlessness.The men in these stories are strong and independent, both physically and emotionally. But they are not infallible. The women in their lives typically reveal to them things about themselves they'd rather not know. A man who hires a crop-duster to spray his land discovers that the pilot's command of an airplane excites wanderlust in the wife he thought he knew. A 34-year-old man, taking a wife and fathering a child, discovers that she was once the lover of his married brother. A man goes in hunt of a grizzly after the killing of a young woman camper, and in a chilling temptation of fate, puts his life in the hands of another woman to whom he has given his high-powered rifle. In other stories, a boy's idyllic life collapses into grief when his loving father dies while they are hunting geese in a frozen landscape. A combine operator harvests a field of wheat for a rancher and dies, his intestines perforated by a lifetime of hard work and hard knocks. A penniless cowboy works the ranch of a rich woman he has loved since she was a girl, knowing that "There is nothing to own but what you do." An old man's daughter is shot and killed, and the young man who first romanced her pays a call on her mourning father. The stories often deal with death or are about the defiance of death, and these themes seem to emerge from the landscape itself - remote, sparsely populated, given to extremes of heat and cold. The characters Kittredge creates are sharply drawn, and their speech is colorful and unschooled. Emotion surges beneath taciturn surfaces. There is tension in their unspoken desires, and for that reason the relationships between men and women are rarely untroubled. I highly recommend this collection of stories for readers interested in the West and the psychological impact of wide-open spaces and unsentimental lives. As a companion book, I'd also recommend Ralph Beer's terrific Montana novel, "The Blind Corral." 4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Better than God,
By Ralph Beer "Jackson Creek" - Published on Amazon.com
This review is from: Best Short Stories Of William Kitteridge (Paperback)
Kittredge is best known, perhaps, for his essays on the American West, but some of us old timers have been reading (and loving) his short stories for thirty years now. Bill's prose reinforces the rumors that God sat in on his graduate fiction workshops at the University of Montana back in 1978; his characters take your breath away on their varius paths to self-discovery and self-destruction; and, always, there is the cruel force of the West itself, underlying each and every sentence.
2 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Be prepared for a downer,
By Lance Kozlowski "Lance" - Published on Amazon.com
This review is from: Best Short Stories Of William Kitteridge (Paperback)
Well written in a brutal way, but there is only so much I can take of stories about depressed, alcoholic macho men who are hurting everyone around them. If you live like this, you might get more out of these characters than I did, but then you would probably not be reading a book in your spare time. You'd be drinking and driving and arguing with your spouse instead.
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