Wyoming
Wyoming

Author: JP Gritton

Publisher: Tin House Books

Published: 2019-11-19

Total Pages: 222

ISBN-13: 1947793535

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A Kirkus Best Fiction of 2019 Pick! A cross between Daniel Woodrell and Annie Proulx, Wyoming is about the stubborn grip of inertia and whether or not it is possible to live without accepting oneself. It’s 1988 and Shelley Cooper is in trouble. He’s broke, he’s been fired from his construction job, and his ex-wife has left him for their next door neighbor and a new life in Kansas City. The only opportunity on his horizon is fifty pounds of his brother’s high-grade marijuana, which needs to be driven from Colorado to Houston and exchanged for a lockbox full of cash. The delivery goes off without a hitch, but getting home with the money proves to be a different challenge altogether. Fueled by a grab bag of resentments and self punishment, Shelley becomes a case study in the question of whether it’s possible to live without accepting yourself, and the dope money is the key to a lock he might never find. JP Gritton’s portrait of a hapless aspirant at odds with himself and everyone around him is both tender and ruthless, and Wyoming considers the possibility of redemption in a world that grants forgiveness grudgingly, if at all.

Bird Cloud
Bird Cloud

Author: Annie Proulx

Publisher: Simon and Schuster

Published: 2011-01-04

Total Pages: 259

ISBN-13: 1439171718

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Part autobiography, part natural history, Bird Cloud is the glorious story of Annie Proulx’s piece of the Wyoming landscape and her home there. “Bird Cloud” is the name Annie Proulx gave to 640 acres of Wyoming wetlands and prairie and four-hundred-foot cliffs plunging down to the North Platte River. On the day she first visited, a cloud in the shape of a bird hung in the evening sky. Proulx also saw pelicans, bald eagles, golden eagles, great blue herons, ravens, scores of bluebirds, harriers, kestrels, elk, deer and a dozen antelope. She fell in love with the land, then owned by the Nature Conservancy, and she knew what she wanted to build on it—a house in harmony with her work, her appetites and her character, a library surrounded by bedrooms and a kitchen. Bird Cloud is the story of designing and constructing that house—with its solar panels, Japanese soak tub, concrete floor, and elk horn handles on kitchen cabinets. It is also an enthralling natural history and archaeology of the region—inhabited for millennia by Ute, Arapaho, and Shoshone Indians—and a family history, going back to nineteenth-century Mississippi riverboat captains and Canadian settlers. Proulx, a writer with extraordinary powers of observation and compassion, here turns her lens on herself. We understand how she came to be living in a house surrounded by wilderness, with shelves for thousands of books and long worktables on which to heap manuscripts, research materials and maps, and how she came to be one of the great American writers of her time.

The American Songbag
The American Songbag

Author: Carl Sandburg

Publisher: Ecco

Published: 1927

Total Pages: 536

ISBN-13:

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Two hundred and eighty songs and ballads trace the growth of America.

Chili Queen
Chili Queen

Author: Marian L. Martinello

Publisher: Texas A&M University Press

Published: 2015-03-22

Total Pages: 256

ISBN-13: 0875656218

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“It happened on the plaza that never slept—my favorite place in the whole of the city,” writes Lupe Pérez, to begin her memoir. A mix of historical fact, vintage photos and maps, recipes, music, folklore, and south Texan culture, Lupe’s story offers an eyewitness account of life on Military Plaza in San Antonio during the 1880s. Facing the impending failure of her family’s chili stand, Lupe is certain she can improve profits. But her older sister and hostess, Josefa, resists Lupe’s arguments—until Tom O’Malley, an itinerant vaudeville actor, arrives. By default, Lupe becomes Chili Queen, but each new venture presents new challenges for the struggling chili stand. Peter Meyer comes to town from the Hill Country to pursue his dream of becoming a shopkeeper. Despite their cultural differences, he and Lupe are drawn to one another by more than romantic feelings. They share a common entrepreneurial dream, and Peter helps Lupe grow in her business savvy. Just as business improves, word spreads of a new city hall on the plaza and the subsequent eviction of all chili stands. Where will they go? What will they do? The choice is Lupe’s to make. And her response is bold.

Public Waters
Public Waters

Author: Anne MacKinnon

Publisher: University of New Mexico Press

Published: 2021-05-01

Total Pages: 480

ISBN-13: 0826362427

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Wyoming’s colorful story of water management illuminates the powerful forces that impact water use in the rural American West. The state’s rich history of managing this valuable natural resource provides insights and lessons for the twenty-first-century American West as it faces drought and climate change. Public Waters shows how, as popular hopes and dreams meet tough terrain, a central idea that has historically structured water management can guide water policy for Western states today. Drawing on forty years as a journalist with training in water law and economics, Anne MacKinnon paints a lively picture of the arcane twists in the notable record of water law in Wyoming. She maintains that other Western states should examine how local people control water and that states must draw on historical understandings of water as a public resource to find effective approaches to essential water issues in the West.

Follow de Drinkin' Gou'd
Follow de Drinkin' Gou'd

Author: James Frank Dobie

Publisher:

Published: 1928

Total Pages: 214

ISBN-13:

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The Play-Party in Oklahoma.--B. Botkin. Folk-Lore Relating to Texas Birds.--J. Strecker. Tall Tales for the Tenderfeet.--A. Penn. Fishback Yarns from the Sulphurs.--J. Deaver. Paul Bunyan:Oil Man.--J. Brooks. Pipeline Days and Paul Bunyan.--A. Garland. Le Loup Blanc of Bolivar's Peninsula.--P. Tucker. Pioneer Folk Tales.--M. Atkinson and J. Dobie. The Corn Thief-A Folk Anecdote.--J.raddock. The Texas Pecan; The Man in the Moon.--G. Bludworth. Follow the Drinking Gourd.--H. Parks. Some Negro Folk-Songs of Texas.--M. Bales. Six Negro Folk-Songs.--N. Smith. Confidences from Old Nacogdoches.--M. Emmons. The Ghosts of Lake Jackson.--B. Dobie. How Mr. Polecat Got His Scent.--K.O'Connor. De Pot-Song.--P. Throop. Notes on Some Recent Treatments of Negro Folk-Lore.--R. Law. Some Characteristics of Cowboy Songs.--N. Gaines. More Ballads and Songs of the Frontier Folk.--J. Dobie.

Folk Nation
Folk Nation

Author: Simon J. Bronner

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers

Published: 2002-08-01

Total Pages: 302

ISBN-13: 0742580237

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This lively reader traces the search for American tradition and national identity through folklore and folklife from the 19th century to the present. Through an engaging set of essays, Folk Nation shows how American thinkers and leaders have used folklore to express the meaning of their country. Simon Bronner has carefully selected statements by public intellectuals and popular writers as well as by scholars, all chosen for their readability and significance as provocative texts during their time. The common thread running throughout is the value of folklore in expressing or denying an American national tradition. This text raises timely issues about the character of American culture and the direction of American society. The essays show the development of views of American nationalism, multiculturalism, and commercialism. Provocative topics include debates over the relationship between popular culture and folk culture, the uniqueness of an American literature and arts based on folk sources, the fabrication of folk heroes such as Pecos Bill and Paul Bunyan as propaganda for patriotism and nationalism, the romanticizations of vernacular culture by popularizers such as Walt Disney and Ben Botkin, the use of folklore for ethnocentric purposes, and the political deployment of folklore by conservatives as emblems of 'traditional values' and civil virtues and by liberals as emblems of multiculturalism and tolerance of alternative lifestyles. The book also traces the controversy over who conveyed the myth of 'America.' Was it the nation's poets and artists, its academics, its politicians and leaders, its communities and local educational institutions, its theme parks and festivals, its movie moguls and entertainers? Folk Nation shows how the process of defining the American mystique through folklore was at the core of debates among writers and thinkers about the value of Davey Crockett, John Henry, quilts, cowboys, and immigrants as symbols of America.