About This Book
Cumulatively, the eight stories in this exceptionally cohesive first collection feel novelistic in scope and scale. Most of the tales are set in the wide open spaces of Wyoming, ranging in time from 1868 to the late 1970s. A strong sense of how landscape and geography shape and mold character permeates the book. In the clever and subtle Disarmament, two loners, one an Air Force captain in charge of maintaining decoy missile silos, the other a schoolteacher from Cheyenne who rents a two-room cabin on the prairie each summer, discover each other through their affinity for the plains. At the other end of the spectrum, the 1878 visit to the Wyoming Territory of Thomas Edisonpresented as a huckster by necessity and a genius by birthspurs the 16-year-old protagonist of Thomas Edison by Moonlight to leave his native small town. Intolerance, in its cruelest form, rears its head in the fanciful The Chimpanzees of Wyoming and turns into racism in Refugees, a story of a family of Hmong refugees from Laos who fail to find acceptance in a Wyoming ranching community. Racism and sexuality motivate the breakup of a three-way friendship in Nativity; and another friendship suffers in Television Lies, once a relay transmitter makes TV possible in a remote Wyoming valley. In fact, as the title suggests, the incursion of technology into the Westthe world's inexorable reeling in of its open spacesis the theme that unites this polished collection. (Nov.)
