2012 Eric Hoffer Book Awards for General Fiction Honorable Mention 2011 Utah Book Award Finalist Crooked Creek takes place during the latter part of westward expansion and chronicles the lives (and deaths) of the Wood family. The WoodsPreston and Saramust flee Arizona when they, along with Sara's parents and little brother Jasper, unwittingly get caught up in the plunder and sale of American Indian corpses and funerary objects. Preston, Sara, and Jasper end up in the Heber Valley of Utah, where they seek the support of Sara's Uncle Neff until they can be reunited with Sara's mother and father. But from the moment they ride into Heber, Preston and Sara learn that life in the valley is not as it appears, and that no matter how far we run, we cannot escape the past. Maximilian Werner is the author of Black River Dreams, a collection of literary fly fishing essays that won the 2008 Utah Arts Council's Original Writing Competition for Nonfiction: Book. Mr. Werner's poems, fiction, creative nonfiction, and essays have appeared in several journals and magazines, including Matter Journal: Edward Abbey Edition, Bright Lights Film Journal, The North American Review, ISLE, Weber Studies, Fly Rod and Reel, and Columbia. He lives in Salt Lake City with his wife and two children and teaches writing at the University of Utah. Maximilian Werner is a fresh and grounded writer, a welcome and original new voice.” Thomas McGuane, author of Driving on the Rim Here in the deep measured prose of Max Werner is a western story, harsh and lush as the old world it depicts. Crooked Creek shows again that one of the natural laws of the wilderness—along with wind and stone and animals and family—is violence. Just as wind and water shaped the stone, trouble shaped these men. With its compelling, layered story, this rich book is a reader’s pleasure.” Ron Carlson, author of The Signal Max Werner’s Crooked Creek offers a haunting voyage into the past and into living landscapes sharpened by western light, resonating with the work of such authors as Cormac McCarthy and Wallace Stegner. A narrative of the vitality of family bonds, it is also a tale of the heroic struggle to carry the burden of memory and to transform history’s nightmares into visions of possibility, as Octavio Paz once argued was the high calling of literature. Crooked Creek reminds us of the tough aesthetic that is required to sustain hope in family, in community, and in the staggering and heartbreaking beauty of nature that Werner’s prose powerfully illuminates, while also reckoning with the dark sins of betrayal and violence that are the legacies of the American West. Werner convinces us that no meaningful sense of place is possible otherwise.” George Handley, author of Home Waters: A Year of Recompenses on the Provo River

Crooked Creek

Literature & Fiction

Werner, Maximilian

United States

Torrey House Press

Bird-watchers will love this journey back to the 1880s West Coast when vast populations of wild birds still filled the skies in annual migrations. But the birds were imperiled by plume hunters intent on personal fortune. This story of violence, love, and loss portrays the advent of the Audubon Society. A moving story of conflict, friendship, and love, The Plume Hunter follows the life of Fin McFaddin, a late-nineteenth century Oregon outdoorsman who takes to plume hunting killing birds to collect feathers for women’s hats to support his widowed mother. In 1885, more than five million birds were killed in the United States for the millinery industry, prompting the formation of the Audubon Society. The novel brings to life an era of our country’s natural history seldom explored in fiction, and follows Fin’s relationships with his lifelong friends as they struggle to adapt to society’s changing mores. Renée Thompson writes about wildlife, her love of birds, and the people who inhabit the American West. Her first novel, The Bridge at Valentine, received high praise from Pulitzer Prize-winner Larry McMurtry, author of Lonesome Dove. Renée lives in Northern California with her husband, Steve, and is at work on a short-story collection. The Plume Hunter won the 2012 da Vinci Eye Award, presented by the Eric Hoffer Award for Books, for its superior cover art. I really enjoyed this book. It offers a fascinating glimpse into the life of a bird hunter and the complex social, economic and personal issues swirling around the birth of the conservation movement.” -David Sibley, author of THE SIBLEY GUIDE TO BIRDS Renée Thompson’s gripping novel transports the reader to a time when our nation was trying its best to grow up, yet seemed mired in its own awkward teen” years...I read this book in one sitting, finding it no easier to put down than Fin did his hunting guns.” -Bill Thompson III, Editor, Bird Watcher’s Digest Renée Thompson brings us to a place of semi-darkness, with its confused emotions, and allows us to witness the Hunter” changing from within. This is a story of process and a quest to redeem. I love it.” -Fr. Tom Pincelli, Former Chairman, American Birding Association A compelling chronicle of avarice, betrayal, and redemption.” -Tim Gallagher, author of The Grail Bird "[THE PLUME HUNTER is] an economically written literary drama sparked by expert dialogue and visualized through an acute sense of place.” -Allen Pierleoni, book critic for The Sacramento Bee

The Plume Hunter

Thompson, Renée

Literary

2011 Best Novel, Association for Mormon letters 2011 Finalist, Montaigne Medal, Eric Hoffer Awards What happens when a two-headed cowboy, a high school dropout, and a poet abducted by aliens come together in 1970’s Moab, Utah? The Scholar of Moab, a dark-comedy perambulating murder, affairs, and cowboy mysteries in the shadow of the hoary La Sal Mountains. Young Hyrum Thayne, an unrefined geological surveyor, steals a massive dictionary out of the Grand County library in a midnight raid, startling the good people of Moab into believing a nefarious band of Book of Mormon thugs, the Gadianton Robbers, has arisen again. To make matters worse, Hyrum’s illicit affair with Dora Tanner, a local poet thought to be mad, results in the delivery of a bouncing baby boy who vanishes the night of his birth. Righteous Moabites accuse Dora of the murder, but who really killed their child? Did a coyote dingo the baby? Was it an alien abduction as Dora claims? Was it Hyrum? Or could it have been the only witness to the crime, one of a pair of Oxford-educated conjoined twins who cowboy in the La Sals on sabbatical? Take a blazing ride with Hyrum LeRoy Thayne, the Lord’s Chosen Servant and Defender of Moab. His short rich life spans the borderlands of magical realism where geology, ecology philosophy, and consciousness collide, in Steven L. Peck’s rip-snorting tale The Scholar of Moab. Steven L. Peck knows Moab, inside out. An evolutionary ecologist at Brigham Young University, Peck teaches the philosophy of biology. His scientific work has appeared in American Naturalist, Newsweek, Evolution, Trends in Ecology and Evolution, Biological Theory, Agriculture and Human Values, Biology &amp; Philosophy. Steven also co-edited a volume on environmental stewardship. His creative works include a novel, The Gift of the King's Jeweler (2003 Covenant Communications). His poetry has appeared in Dialogue, Bellowing Ark, Irreantum, Red Rock Review and other magazines. Peck was nominated for the 2011 Science Fiction Poetry Association’s Rhysling Award. Other awards include the Meyhew Short Story Contest, First Place at Warp and Weave, Honorable Mention in the 2011 Brookie and D.K. Brown Fiction Contest, and Second Place in the Eugene England Memorial Essay Contest. Steven Peck has imagined a world ever-so-slightly tweaked from this real one, butwell, why wouldn’t conjoined twins have an independent consciousness, bumblebees be more dependent on faith than wings, and Einstein sing German nursery rhymes? The Scholar of Moab explores the otherworld of nature, imagination, and mind.” Brooke Williams, Halflives: Reconciling Work and Wildness "It’s satire of the best sort: biting what it loves, snuggling up to what it hates." Scott Abbott, Professor of Philosophy and Humanities, Director of Integrated Studies, Utah Valley University "Peck moves easily from the lyrical to the grotesque, and sets his multi-voiced tale in the ideal place: Moab, Utah--where red rocks and surprising arches provide the ideal backdrop for anything in or out of the world, including space ships and kidnapped babies." Margaret Blair Young, President: Association for Mormon Letters "Peck convincingly merges the genre of magical realism with American West fiction by invoking the power of personal testimonynot his own, but by presenting the recorded testimony of his characters in letters, journals, poetry, and interview transcripts. Using these disparate voices, Peck concocts a strange and tragicomic brew of naivety, philosophy, faith, discovery, and loss." Blair Dee Hodges, Standing on the Promises, The Association for Mormon Letters

The Scholar of Moab

Peck, Steven L.

Religion & Spirituality

Convicts round up wild mustangs, a schizophrenic homeless man wins the jackpot and disappears, a truck driver with a child's mind spends his last hours in the embrace of a prostitute's photosdisparate and vivid, Mark Maynard's characters intersect in the new wild west of Reno, Nevada. Throughout the volume’s eight tenuously linked tales, lives and fortune are lost, and the city of Reno emerges as a locus of shattered souls. Maynard’s debut collection bursts with idiosyncratic characterspacks a strong emotional punchis strangely entertaining.” Publishers Weekly In Grind, Maynard reveals a world the Nevada tourism board would rather you didn’t seeA debut collection of stories that perfectly captures the seediness, desperation and sense of loss permeating the hot desert world of Reno.” Shelf Awareness [Grind has] plenty of those characters who make a visit to the environs of Reno both an exciting potential and an illicit affairThis is a Northern Nevada book.” Reno News &amp; Review Mark Maynard’s Reno is so sleazily appealing, so filled with convict cowboys, wild horses, racing pilots, truckers, snow bums, eco-terrorists, tattoo conventions, pawnshops and jackpots that you emerge from reading Grind dazed by this author’s empathy for neglected quarters of humanity. You feel gritty all overand more alive.” Carolyn Cooke, author of Daughters of the Revolution The characters in these stories are as beautiful and broken as the desert itself. Mark Maynard explores the stony truths of lost lives with an unflinching eye for detail, an insider's sense of the place and its people, and an honest compassion. The heartbreaks here are real, as are the moments of uncommon grace and hard-won redemption.” Kim Barnes, author of In the Kingdom of Men Mark Maynard's Grind is chock full of men and women who are desperate with want and full of spirit. Pawnbrokers. Truckers. Casino shills. Prison inmates. They're all here, and they're all gloriously alive. This is prime American fictiontough, generous, and open-eyed.” Alyson Hagy, author of Boleto

Grind

Maynard, Mark

*Utah Book Award Winner--Fiction, 2013* With "lyrical prose and heartfelt characters" (Publishers Weekly), this historical novel tracks the life of one resolute young woman who dares resist communal salvation in order to find her own. Clair Martin's dauntless search for self leads her from devout, frontier Utah to the chaos of Reconstruction Dixie and then back West, where she learns how to take her place, at last, in the land she loves.

Tributary

Richardson, Barbara K.

The Utah Canyons WildMall gives tourists exactly what they want. An archivist preserves a rare map of a vanished Lake Tahoe. The Grand Canyon can only be visited in replica form. These storieslyrical, deadpan, surrealblur the line between the natural world and the world we make. A Library Journal Best Short Story Collection of the Year Praise for Recapture: Unsentimental stories that tell us what the American West looks like now and what we’ve lost; the Grand Canyon, for instance, can be seen only in replica after environmental catastrophe.” LIBRARY JOURNAL "Recapture is a living, breathing museum of natural wonders. With writing as spare as the landscape she evokes, Olsen wades through the detritus of the human experience and finds clarity there, and some magic, too." ZYZZYVA "Recapture isa gem, a small collection of stories that is a pleasure to read and consider." TERRAIN.ORG "Olsen's deft use of language creates stories that exude not only loneliness and longing, but also dark humor." SUNDOG LIT "These are sexy stories that are never explicit, knowing exactly which details are necessary for their effect and describing no more." TOTTENVILLE REVIEW "True to its name, Recapture grasps after lost loves, fading histories, and shifting landscapes to bring us an expertly curated series of human exhibits in an expansive, outdoor museum." THE MUSEUM OF AMERICANA "Erica Olsen gives us the dream life of the Southwest in this striking collection, a landscape told in language as spare and pungent and exacting as the desert itself. A swift and lovely debut from a writer of real gifts." KEVIN CANTY, author of Where the Money Went "These sly, heartbreaking stories capture the modern West, where the past is ever-present and the future is already here." ALISON BAKER, author of How I Came West, and Why I Stayed "Beneath their polished surfaces, Erica Olsen's stories are subversive, sometimes darkly funny, and always disquieting. This accomplished writer really knows her way through the tricky zone between truth and falsehood where art is made." SUSAN LOWELL HUMPHREYS, author of Ganado Red "A sharp, wise new voice from the American West, Erica Olsen is the real thing. As wild as David Foster Wallace or George Saunders and as tender as James Salter or Alice Munro, Olsen’s stories are hilarious, painful, and achingly lovely." AMANDA EYRE WARD, author of Close Your Eyes "Like all good narratives, Erica Olsen’s Grand Canyon II” suggests great consequence. The past is another country. The task of memory is impossible. No one exists and nothing ever happened. But somewhere in your brain, a beautiful lie is being spun..." SARAH MANGUSO, author of The Guardians "Recapture is like a lost map of the backcountry, detailing the forgotten places where secrets shove up through the dust, pieces of lives demanding to be made whole. The territory is endlessly illuminating and constantly surprising, revealing a master storyteller at work." KIM TODD, author of Tinkering with Eden: A Natural History of Exotic Species in America

Recapture

Olsen, Erica

"With tough women and sensitive men, desertdry humor, hotsprings sensuality, heartbreaking secrets, escalating suspense, and a 360degree perspective on the battle over water, Richman's twentyfirstcentury western is riveting, wise, and compassionate." BOOKLIST, starred review "[A] compelling story of a ranching family divided by a proposed water pipeline that would draw water from western Utah to Las Vegas." —THE SALT LAKE TRIBUNE "Richman helps readers understand and feel deeply each side of a complex story." —DESERET NEWS "[Richman's] narrative account of the impact of climate change on those that live in the worst affected areashuman and animal alikeis an emotional prophecy of what lies in store for all of us." 15 BYTES "With a unique voice, Richman crystallizes how secrets and silences flow through the generationswith depth of characters, beauty of language, and a haunting understanding of the landscapes that define us." JANE KIRKPATRICK, bestselling author of Where Lilacs Still Bloom "The Ordinary Truth tells a pageturner of a story about love and loyalty, loss and regretand, ultimately, the stunning absolution of the simple truth. Richman writeswith the sure hand of a formidable storyteller." STEPHEN TRIMBLE, author of Bargaining for Eden When Nell Jorgensen buried her husband, she buried a piece of herselfand more than one secret. Now, thirty-six years later, the rift between Nell and her daughter Kate threatens to implode as Kate, now forty-six and a water manager for the Nevada Water Authority, plans to pipe water from a huge aquifer that lies beneath the family ranch to thirsty Las Vegas. Meanwhile, Nell's twenty-one-year-old granddaughter Cassie intends to unearth those old secrets and repair the resentments that grew in their place. Throughout the novel, sparse and beautiful landscapes surround an emotional wilderness of love, loss, and family. Jana Richman is the award-winning author of The Last Cowgirl (HarperCollins, 2009), which won the 2009 Willa Award for Contemporary Fiction. A sixth-generation Utahn, Jana was born and raised in Utah's west desert, the daughter of a small-time rancher and a hand-wringing Mormon mother. With the exception of a few misguided years spent in New York City trying to make a fortune on Wall Street, she has lived her entire life west of the hundredth meridian. She writes about issues that threaten to destroy the essence of the westand about passion, beauty, and love. Jana lives in Escalante, Utah.
 Praise for Jana Richman's The Last Cowgirl: "Richman's mastery of the emotional geography is illuminating...Calls to mind the work of Pat Conroy." Kirkus Reviews Praise for Jana Richman’s Riding in the Shadows of Saints: A Woman’s Story of Motorcycling the Mormon Trail: Openhearted and uncommonly balanced.” Entertainment Weekly Tartly funny.” Chicago Tribune Surprising and refreshing.” Philadelphia Inquirer Much to admire in [this] moving memoir...[Richman] can write lyrically and unsentimentally about the most intimate experiences.” Newsday (New York) Beautifully poetic...exploratory...thought-provoking.” New Orleans Times-Picayune Frank and beguilingly unsentimental, Riding in the Shadows of Saints is an honest look at a powerful and wealthy institution and the people who live within its structures.” Tucson Citizen A mixture of road trip musings, quirky adventure tales, and spiritual reflections, with a healthy dose of unresolved family issues...universally compelling.” Publishers Weekly

The Ordinary Truth

Richman, Jana

The stories in The Legend's Daughter inhabit present–day Idaho where fires, streams, and landscapes ask—even demand—that individuals reconsider and reorient their lives. An award–winning playwright, David Kranes infuses this collection with swift dialogue and complicated characters, including a kayaking actor, a rebellious high school teacher, and a lipstick–loving fly fisherman. A 15 Bytes 2014 Book Award Winner "In this exceptional collection of stories set mostly in Idaho in the deep backwoods along river banks and lonely county roads, Kranes' characters are all thrown out of their comfort zones. And so is the reader. Richly drawn and complex, these stories challenge the intellect. Kranes has managed to somehow dam the river of souls these stories possess. They do not lie still, however, between the covers but rather spin in farreaching whirlpools of genuine humanity and mortality." 15 Bytes "There's something to be said about a writer whose style is easily recognized, whose voice stands out, whose stories are readily identified. What’s remarkable about David Kranes's writing and these stories, though, is that each story stands out on its own merit, while every story is well crafted and conceived. Nothing one-dimensional about his people, nothing one dimensional about his prose, either." ForeWord Reviews From rainbow trout jumping in the Salmon River to watering holes on the edge of McCall Lake, each of the ten stories in author and playwright David Kranes’s The Legend’s Daughter transports the reader to the wilderness of Eastern Idaho. While Kranes renders a common setting in each story, the collection is not simply a detailed portrait of Idaho, but an examination of the lives of restless people seeking to escape from their lives and find peace." ZYZZYVA "The Legend’s Daughter is a story collection of real people struggling with identity, with love, with time, rooted in the rugged and indifferent beauty of Idaho where each character finds his or her mirror in water, in stone, in place. David Kranes shows how our tenacious love of life can transform any situation, large or small, into alchemy. We are all living inside these raw and well-drawn pages." Terry Tempest Williams, author of When Women Were Birds "These Idaho stories are vintage David Kranes. He, more than any other writer, is the one whose work spurs me to reconsider what fiction can do. He uses language like a knife and the worlds in his stories come off the page at me. We haven’t seen this Idaho before. I’m thrilled to have these stories, every one of them provocative, riveting, and robust." Ron Carlson, author of The Signal "In these times of disconnection, David Kranes lassoes us with the delicate tether of his multiple gifts and brings us home . . . a storyteller and an elegant craftsman." Mary Sojourner, author of 29 "David Kranes has given us ten stories, entirely various, often splendid, sometimes hilarious or heartbreaking." William Kittredge, author of The Willow Field

The Legend's Daughter

Kranes, David

In this love story of land and family, Kayann Short explores her farm roots from her grandparents’ North Dakota homesteads to her own Stonebridge Farm, an organic, community-supported farm on the Colorado Front Range where small-scale, local agriculture borrows lessons of the past to cultivate sustainable communities for the future. "Scattered in among musings of local food systems, community action, family history, and current farm realities are clear moments of reflection that demonstrate Short’s acumen as a writer." Terrain.org: A Journal of the Built + Natural Environments "Short's focus on a CSA makes this memoir distinctive from other recent farmrelated nonfiction." Western American Literature Journal "A Bushel’s Worth is my favorite kind of nonfiction. Not only is it about many topics close to my heartgardening, food, familyit is a beautifully told story, and a love story at that, centered around the love of a couple, their love for the land, and a community’s love for a way of life. This book forever changed my perspective and awareness as I 'walk out' in my own garden." Katrina Kittle, author, The Blessings of the Animals "A heartfelt meditation on farm, food, and family. A Bushel’s Worth tells a love story of the land and a life spent caring for it.” Hannah Nordhaus, author, The Beekeeper’s Lament: How One Man and Half a Billion Honeybees Help Feed America Kayann Short shares a passionate and often lyrical account of how she and her husband John took their first brave steps toward revitalizing a small Colorado farm and with it their lives and the community they drew around them. It is an inspiring story, a gift for all of us, both on and off the farm, who are trying to learn how to slow down our frenzied lives so that we may give ourselves to what really matters.” Gregory Spaid, author, Grace: Photographs of Rural America "With a companionable mix of literary and earthy sensibilities, Kayann Short writes with graceful, ferocious attentiveness [and] finds reassurance for herself and her modern family in the old wisdom of the fields.” John Calderazzo, author, Rising Fire: Volcanoes &amp; Our Inner Lives [A] beautifully written and sensually rich ecobiography’ of farm life...A Bushel’s Worth is a loving natural history of a farm, a marriage, and a way of life that has changed interestingly and dramatically over just a few generations.” Jane Shellenberger, author, Organic Gardener’s Companion: Growing Vegetables in the West The book is a substantial meal...as much about growing community as it is about growing food, and it leaves the reader with a generous bushel of instruction and inspiration on both counts.” Susan Becker, Director, Boulder Public Library Oral History Program A Bushel’s Worth: An Ecobiography eloquently depicts humans and nature coexisting and mutually benefiting not only in theory, but in actuality...where people treat each other respectfully as they gently work on and with the land.” Shelly Eberly, National Outings Leader, Sierra Club

A Bushel's Worth: An Ecobiography

Biographies & Memoirs

Short, Kayann

Professionals & Academics

"The first book in Bishop's Tate McCoy series will have readers eager to hear more from her pragmatic, sarcastic, yet sweet 16-year-old heroine. Tate's ability to compartmentalize her fears and emotions, her attempts to preserve her optimism through small gestures, and the tension and mystery surrounding the crime make Bishop's debut an introspective page-turner." —Publishers Weekly "Yet another tale of a plucky girl who overcomes the obstaclesbut this one floats." Kirkus Reviews "What a fine book! My So-Called Ruined Life takes you on a hard walk through a difficult subject, yet is full of sweetness and humor. Tate McCoy is a keeper, and so is her best friend, Kale. I felt like I was right there during their conversations and excursions, and found Tate’s reflections on her life and painful situation deeply meaningful. Tate is a kid who prevails, her humanity fully intact." Kathleen Jeffrie Johnson, author of Target, and The Parallel Universe of Liars "Readers will fall in love with brave and funny Tate McCoy in this powerful and heartfelt debut about human fallibility. One of the truest characters I've had the good luck to discover in YA recently." Beth Ann Bauman, author of Jersey Angel and Rosie and Skate Melanie Bishop is not afraid to address tough issuesfrom unspeakable violence to dysfunctional family relationshipswith realistic details and hit-you-in-the-gut emotion. The plot gracefully unfolds to a stunning climax that forces the charactersand readersto reconsider the nature of love, justice, and forgiveness.” Christine Seifert, author of The Predicteds Tate McCoy has not spoken to her alcoholic mother in two years when her mom is murdered. If this were not enough to endure at age sixteen, Tate has to face the fact that her father is the prime suspect. Convinced of his innocence, and of her own resilience, she sets out to prove her life is not ruined. Amid this life-shattering tragedy, Tate takes up swimming and finds solace in her best friend Kale, volunteer work, the great outdoors, and a new crush. But after discovering a horrible secret, Tate questions everything she thought she knew about her parents. This is the first book in the Tate McCoy series. Melanie Bishop writes fiction, nonfiction, and screenplays, and has taught all of these subjects for the past twenty-one years at Prescott College in Arizona where she is founding editor of Alligator Juniper, Prescott's award-winning national literary magazine. Bishop divides her time between Prescott, Arizona, and Carmel, California.

My So-Called Ruined Life (Tate McCoy Series)

Teen & Young Adult

Bishop, Melanie

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