This season offers plenty of beach reads, but there are a few new books coming out that might require some thought. Anyway you cut it, there are some heavyweights on their way to book store shelves. And most fall silent, due to a lack of opportunity. Episodic in form, the story is told alternately by Patty Reed, now a woman in her 80s, and her father, a stubborn man with the look of the black Irish. It is Jim Reed's dream that drives him to take his family to California.
Westerners write westerns.
Like Western artists, who were dismissed as illustrators, Western writers often were dubbed regionalists. That's a slap in the face, because from the beginning, Western writers have produced some of America's finest literature.