I reviewed Alyson Hagy’s beautiful, authentic new novel Boleto for the Dallas Morning News. Here’s how my review begins:

Boleto (Graywolf Press, $24)

Alyson Hagy

In her wise new novel Boleto, Alyson Hagy follows modern-day Wyoming cowboy Will Testerman on his simple quest: to make his way in the world through his gift for working with horses, and to prove he can spot raw talent by training a quarter horse, bought cheap, into a polo pony he can sell for riches.

In old Western stories, cowboys worked on open-range cattle drives, conditions that existed for only a few decades but still loom large in the romantic myth of the West. In Hagy’s contemporary story, cowboys work on guest ranches, where well-off people enamored of those Western tales come to vacation, and the cowboys must handle the humans as much as livestock.

Will’s older brothers “managed to cover the bases on the family ranch” in Wyoming. Will’s father works an extra job at a print shop, bitterly. “The money was necessary,” Hagy writes. “The business was dying. His father understood only one option: to squeeze the rock until it was dry.” There is no future for Will back home.

Please click through to read the rest:

http://www.dallasnews.com/entertainment/books/20120601-a-cowboy-his-talents-and-his-horses-combine-to-form-alyson-hagy-s-newest-novel-boleto.ece

This summer I read a gorgeous piece of prose called Lime Creek by songwriter Joe Henry. I’m not sure what to call it—it’s not quite a novel, not quite a short story collection. A series of prose poems might be the best way to describe it. I got to meet Joe Henry at the Montana Festival of the Book in Missoula in October—he seems as though he has stepped out of another era. He was reticent on the panel we were on together with Bonnie Jo Campbell and Jonathan Evison, as though unused to talking in public. Later he told me he doesn’t have internet access in his cabin in Woody Creek, Colorado, and doesn’t want it. He seemed a little overwhelmed by all the people coming up and talking to him. His work is authentic and moving. Here’s a bit of my review from the High Country News, which ran last week:

Lime Creek

Joe Henry

160 pages, hardcover: $20.

Random House, 2011.

Woody Creek, Colo.-based Joe Henry studied at the Iowa Writer’s Workshop with John Irving, but then detoured from writing fiction to work as a rancher, becoming a successful lyricist along the way. Henry’s ravishing first work of fiction, Lime Creek, must have been inspired by the Western lifestyle he chose: It’s filled with exquisite snapshots of life on a Wyoming ranch.

The cadences of his prose are unusual and arresting as he tells the elemental story of the Davis family, beginning when father Spencer Davis — “whose soul parties with the antelope smelling of sage and horselather and covered by the insubstantial globe of a great tumbleweed” — meets his future wife Elizabeth on his family’s ranch. She’s there for the summer with her wealthy Connecticut parents, and after Spencer heads to Cambridge for college, they elope.”

Please click through to the High Country News website to read the rest:

bit.ly/sc3Biw