Ghosts of Wyoming
Stories
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- USD 9.99
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- USD 9.99
Descripción editorial
An unsentimental vision of the west, new and old, comes to life in a gritty new collection of stories by the author of Snow, Ashes
In Ghosts of Wyoming, Alyson Hagy explores the hardscrabble lives and terrain of America's least-populous state. Beyond the tourist destinations of Jackson Hole and Yellowstone lies a less familiar and wilder frontier defined by the tension wrought by abundance and scarcity. A young runaway with a big secret slips across the state border and steals a collie pup from the Meeker County fairgrounds. A chorus of trainmen details a day spent laying rail across the Wyoming Territory, while contemporary voices describe life in the oil and gas fields near Gillette. A traveling preacher is caught up in a deadly skirmish between cattle rustlers and ranchers on his way from Rawlins to the Indian reservation on the Popo Agie River. Locals and activists clash when a tourist makes an archaeological discovery near Hoodoo Mountain. With spirited, lyrical prose, Hagy expertly weaves together Wyoming's colorful pioneer and speculator history with the notoften- heard voices of petroleum workers, thrill-seeking rock climbers, and those left behind by the latest boom and bust.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In her fourth collection of short stories, Hagy (Snow, Ashes) explores the lonely state of the Equality State, with its literally and figuratively haunted inhabitants. Hagy has an ear for the locals and a feel for the vast lonely landscape, capturing modern issues like small ranchers' struggles with wolves and environmentalists, and the small details of late nights in pickups and the gradual erosion of Wyoming's landscape. Western archetypes make appearances cowboys and Native Americans, park rangers, prospectors, and preachers, albeit sometimes with a twist. The stories range in tone from the moody mysteriousness of "Border," about a drifter boy and his dog, and the grimness of the life of early rail workers in "Brief Lives of the Trainmen," to humor, as in "Superstitions of the Indians," the collection's weakest entry, about a college student worried that he might be haunted by a faculty member. Hagy is most comfortable inhabiting the past, and while the contemporary stories misfire a few times, the collection is mostly enjoyable and features a strong, dark current of empty lands, wandering spirits, and dread.
