The Interior Country: Stories of the Modern West ed. by Alexander Blackburn, Craig Lesley, Jill Landem

Abstract

Reviews 165 The Interior Country: Stories of the Modern West. Edited byAlexander Black­ burn with Craig Lesley and Jill Landem. (Athens, Ohio: Swallow Press/Ohio University Press, 1987. 333 pages, $24.95/$11.95.) The serious western short story is as alive and well as it has ever been. The Interior Country is the most recent of several anthologies of modern western stories published during the last dozen years. Given the currently renewed interest in the short story by both readers and publishers, it appears at a promising time. And The Interior Country is a sound collection, containing an introduction by Alexander Blackburn, sixteen short stories, and three wellunified novel excerpts, along with brief headnotes. The authors represented, born between 1902 and 1948, include older figures such as Frank Waters, Walter Clark, Wallace Stegner, Jean Stafford, James B. Hall and William Eastlake; writers born around the 1930s like Edward Abbey, Rudolfo Anaya, Max Schott, William Kittredge, Gladys Swan, Raymond Carver, Joanne Greenberg, Clark Brown, and David Kranes; and somewhat younger writers like John Nichols, Craig Lesley, Barry Lopez, and Leslie Silko. Their stories, as editor Blackburn indicates, “pretty much cover the territory of the interior country both geographically and culturally and touch a variety of literary forms and modes—tragedy, comedy, satire, fable, elegy, gothic, cuento, science fiction and ‘magic realism.’” While Clark’s “The Indian Well” and Eastlake’s “The Death of Sun” are fairly expected selections, Anaya’s “The Silence of the Llano,” Schott’s “The Horsebreaker,” Brown’s “A Winter’s Tale,” Silko’s “Lullaby,” Hall’s “My Work in California,” Green­ berg’s “The Supremacy of the Hunza,” and Kranes’s “The Whorehouse Pic­ nic” suggest the anthology’s unusual range of material. The stories can be read in line with the editor’s broad thematic headings: “Nature and Self,” “Innocents and Individuals,” “Dark Interiors,” and “Shapes of Tomorrow.” Beyond that loose organization, the volume repre­ sents a sampling of work—by men and women of varied backgrounds and literary reputations—which is skillful and, not necessarily in the most tradi­ tional senses, intimately connected with the West. The Interior Country is a substantial anthology which should interest a general reader and be useful for courses in western American literature or—given the variety of stories and their approaches—the writing of fiction. The existence of such anthologies may lead to further acceptance and understanding of the strengths in contemporary western writing. ROBERT A. RORIPAUGH University of Wyoming ...