Book News
Western Literature Week.
Ten well- known Western authors, including William Kittredge and Boulder’s Patty Limerick, will give public readings in Boulder, Wednesday-Saturday, as part of Western Literature Week.
The event, which celebrates contemporary Western writing, is sponsored by the University of Colorado’s Center of the American West and the Western Literature Association. All events are free and open to the public.
Also appearing will be Acoma Pueblo poet and essayist Simon Ortiz; Chickasaw essayist, poet and novelist Linda Hogan; Chicano poet Aaron Abeyta; writer, artist and producer Teresa Jordan; Colorado novelist Laura Pritchett; poet and writer Reg Saner; Coeur d’Alene tribal member Janet Campbell Hale; and writer and filmmaker Annick Smith, who along with Kittredge produced the movie “A River Runs Through It.”
“Just a couple of decades ago, lots of people thought that Western American literature was an unsophisticated backwater of a field,” Limerick said. “The upcoming Western Literature Week celebrates the renaissance of regional writing that now earns national and international respect.
For a complete schedule of events, go to or call 303-492-4879.
The Denver Post
First Lines
The Keepsake by Tess Gerritsen
“He is coming for me.
“I feel it in my bones. I sniff it in the air, as recognizable as the scent of hot sand and savory spices and the sweat of a hundred men toiling in the sun. These are the smells of Egypt’s western desert, and they are still vivid to me, although that country is nearly half a globe away from the dark bedroom where I now lie. Fifteen years have passed since I walked that desert, but when I close my eyes, in an instant I am there again, standing at the edge of the tent camp, looking toward the Libyan border, and the sunset. The wind moaned like a woman when it swept down the wadi. I still hear the thuds of pickaxes and the scrape of shovels, can picture the army of Egyptian diggers, busy as ants as they swarmed the excavation site, hauling their gufa baskets filled with soil. It seem to be then, when I stood on that desert fifteen years ago, as if I were an actress in a film about someone else’s adventure. Not mine. Certainly it was not an adventure that quiet girl from Indio, California, ever expected to live.
“The lights of a passing car glimmer through my closed eyelids. When I open my eyes, Egypt vanishes. No longer am I standing in the desert gazing at a sky smeared by sunset the color of bruises. Instead I am once again half a world away, lying in my dark San Diego bedroom.”
Recommended at independents
Fiction
1. The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows
2. American Wife, by Curtis Sittenfeld
3. The Story of Edgar Sawtelle, by David Wroblewski
4. Home, by Marilynne Robinson
5. The Art of Racing in the Rain, by Garth Stein
Nonfiction
1. The Last Lecture, by Randy Pausch
2. Goodnight Bush: An Unauthorized Parody, by Erich Origen and Gan Golan
3. When Your Are Engulfed in Flames, by David Sedaris
4. What I Talk About When I Talk About Running, by Haruki Murakami
5. The Secret, by Rhonda Byrne
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