When We Were Wolves
Stories
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- 3,99 €
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- 3,99 €
Publisher Description
"If you could have been around a hundred and fifty years ago, and passed through the landscape as a beaver-trapping tough with Jim Bridger or Jedediah Smith, before coal barons, before soda ash and oil, before Mormons, before you could stand outside and watch satellites pass through the night sky or silhouettes kissing in warm apartment windows, when this history was wild and new, you could have just pointed and named something of permanence, a mountain, a river--at least a creek--after yourself. Or they would have named it for you, a permanent mark, just for being here."
From a new talent that Annie Proulx has called an "important emerging writer" comes a surprising and expansive collection of stories, steeped in the lore of the frontier but unmistakably fresh and of our time.
When We Were Wolves roams over a West we never knew existed--colonized by rogues and tricksters, Custer impersonators, firefighters with a weakness for arson, and the other rootless folk who come to rest under the vast and forgiving desert sky. Jon Billman writes about accidental lives: people who are trapped in unsuitable marriages, impossible situations, but who handle them with the odd grace of those who are determined to live by their own strange code. He mingles the skewed humor of David Sedaris with the loping, rough-edged appeal of Tom McGuane. This is a beguiling new entry on the map of American fiction.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In Billman's distinctive and engaging debut collection of 13 stories, the swaggering, even aggressively masculine rituals of hunting, fishing, prison sports and utilizing big machines blend strangely with the vagaries of religious faith and the difficulties of life in small Mormon towns. The narrator of "Kerr's Fault" is a divorced school teacher in Hams Fork, Wyo., who is falling afoul of the narrow strictures of his school's Mormon-dominant administration. He and another non-Mormon, Wayne Kerr, a renegade painter of nudes and salable kitsch, have some suspicions about their inferior places in the community: "The UPS driver is a Mormon. Wayne and I are convinced our packages ride around town for a few extra days but what can you do?" Together the two friends manifest their outsider status by means of humorously irreverent vandalism, beautiful women and art. Kerr also figures in "Honeyville," a yarn about smuggling mead, of all things, into Utah. One of several stories set in the 1930s and '40s, "Atomic Bar" depicts the uneven partnership between 15-year-old David Hadsell, an orphan, and a wily conman named Mose Dogbane. Mose, in the aftermath of WWII, is trying to promote a uranium rush in Wyoming. The narrative becomes bittersweet as David learns that Mose's brummagem schemes have a harsh side. Billman has a keen sense of the disparate environments in which his protagonists sift through the small change of fate, whether that enterprise involves a Mormon family gleefully eating stolen beef or a hasty, $27 wedding in Reno. Like the early Tom McGuane, the author displays a clear-eyed empathy for people who are not interested in "making it" the American way, including such macho marginal types as firefighters ("Custer Complex") and prisoners (in the title story). He reminds readers that the classic American archetype of the rough-guy-in-tough-times still holds some real surprises.