Wallace Stegner. Maurine Whipple. Levi Peterson. Brady Udall. There are a few others, but it’s a rather short list of authors with works vying for the title of Great Utah Novel. Of course, coronating such a subjective title is nigh impossible, but there are clear contenders. Karin Anderson’s […]
Just a few chapters into the book I realized I was spending more time annotating and thinking about what I had read rather than actually reading words. I believe it’s a good thing. Thinking. Especially if you’re thinking about words written by Terry Tempest Williams. “I hear my […]
Don Quixote had his Sancho Panza. Jo had her Laurie. George and Lennie had each other. Heck, Wilbur had his Charlotte. Throughout the canon, there is a long line of literary duos who inform their stories on a rigging of loyalty that can be stretched to its limits, […]
To do a profile of Todd Robert Petersen, author of the novel It Needs to Look Like We Tried, it is necessary to get the profile out of the way right up front. Taking him in from the side you first see the thatch perched on his head […]
In my youth, as with many young men, I spent my fair share of sleepless days in Las Vegas with neon nights spent stumping up and down the Strip, slipping into gentlemen’s clubs, and eating hot wings in dark and dubious off-the-Strip hovels that passed as restaurants.I saw […]
Somewhere between Chuck Palahniuk of Fight Club fame and the late Harry Crews lies the unsettling genre of Grit Lit. Or maybe the genre spawns and seethes between the two poles of Cormac McCarthy and the firefighter-turned-novelist Larry Brown, the latter deceased at a too-tender age. At any rate, it’s one of those […]
Just a day before I picked up Brooke Williams’ latest book, the nonfiction Open Midnight:Where Ancestors and Wilderness Meet (Trinity University Press), my wife, Chautel, and I had just returned from a long weekend spent in Boulder, Utah. We stayed at the lodge and made daily hikes into the Escalante Staircase […]
Nate Liederbach’s collection, Beasts You’ll Never See, begins: When our youngest sister went anorexic at twenty-nine her cheeks sprouted mold-white peach hair, her gums grayed, her auburn mane scraggled dull and spit clumps, yet we couldn’t mention it. A beast? The story is titled, “Daddy Bird.” And […]
In the 15th Century morality play Everyman, the common conceit is that mankind will come upon a day of reckoning whereupon each man’s life will be scored by each of his good deeds. Everyman, reminded of death at all turns, seeks assurance from his fellows that he has […]
Braden Hepner’s first novel, Pale Harvest (Torrey House Press), is a Sisyphean tale of a young man yearning for more than warm udders, manure, and the patience to make a straight-line furrow with an old tractor held together with bailing wire. The novel is set on a […]
David Lee will be reading and discussing his work, including the book reviewed below, at four different sites in Utah during October as part of the Utah Humanities Book Festival: 10/8 at the SLC Public Library (4th floor) in partnership with City Arts (with poet Gailmarie Pahmeier); […]
For a father, raising a son is fraught with missteps and reversals, aggravation and joy. I can say this with confidence having raised a couple of sons of my own and still working on a third. The hardest part is finding ways to relate. I’ve tried all […]
As I read one of the stories about halfway through David Kranes’ new collection, The Legend’s Daughter, I became lost in the language: the tangents, the circle-rounds, the free-form understated bombast. I started to wonder if I might need whiskey flowing in my veins to understand the narrative, to […]
