Literature of the American West ;

"After years away, Roy Alan Richardson has come to western Texas to grapple with the demons that haunt him. Most of all, he has returned to reckon with mother: Wamba. Through her, he must also face another mother, the farmlands he's called home, for the land is another member of the family for people on the plains, not some lifeless location. So Roy sits raving in a local bar, writing on bar napkins a memoir, a memorial, a suicide note."--BOOK JACKET.

In Max Crawford's Eastertown, one character describes the unnamed western plains community at the center of the novel : "It is a very small place. Sometimes you wonder whether it exists at all, it is so small." Crawford's poignant novel reminds us that there are tragic events so small, so specific to an individual that, like a tree falling in the forest with no one around, they seem inconsequential, but these events have real impact nonetheless. Shortly after the Second World War, Doc Bavender and his friends Llewellyn and Dorothea Rainborough have returned home to resume their lives and responsibilities at the local school, the school they themselves once attacked. Llewellyn is the school superintendent, and wife Dorothea coaches the school's drama productions. Doc Bavender teaches science, the field that ultimately leads this good man to question life itself. When Bavender's family is struck by a senseless accident, every person in the town in affected. Throughout the novel, personal lives weave with a succession of school pageants and plays. The school's stage is at the heart of the story, even as it is at the heart of the school, and the school at the heart of the town--from the opening chapter with its performance of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs and a new-but-old production of A Christmas Carol, to the dramatic murder trial that comes to town, to the redemption story of the Easter Pageant and the concluding dramas of the old setters' day parade and the school's commencement ceremony. Through some rites and dramas, some healing is achieved by a town torn, and those who remain--teachers, students, administrators, townsfolk--know that they will all will come together again in time for the start of a new year.

The time is 1986. Travis Doyle, a restless Vietnam veteran now working as an insurance claims adjuster in the Bay Area, is dispatched to Hawai'i to investigate fire damage at a geothermal drilling site located in volcanic lava fields. The last thing he expects is to confront the mystery of an ancient spirituality and an indigenous world view that tests and challenges his own. On the Big Island he encounters a former lover, Evangeline Sakai, a mixed-blood woman who, after many years away, has returned hoping to reconnect with her ancestral past. She becomes Travis's guide through a realm of nature signs and uncanny coincidences. With her he comes to know a world in which two opposing views are in conflict: Earth as commodity (whose resources exist to be consumed) and Earth as ancestor (to be honored and revered). The Last Paradise begins in San Francisco and pushes farther west, past the continent's edge, out into the Pacific. While its environmental drama is as contemporary as today's headlines, the novel resonates with the ancient theme of quest and transformation. A compelling cross-cultural love story, it is also a lyrical meditation on the volcano. Said to be the home of Pele, the fire goddess, Hawai'i's volcano region is at once destructive and creative, deadly and healing. Its capacity to transform human lives is at the heart of this powerful tale of crisis and renewal.

For this edition, noted scholar Gary Scharnhorst has selected 259 letters (including 144 that are new to scholarship) from more than 2,000 Bret Harte letters known to exist. Scharnhorst's lively introduction and comprehensive notes give general readers and specialists immediate access to the literary and social milieus in which Harte lived and worked. A painstaking correspondent, Bret Harte created in his letters fascinating vignettes of life on several fronts during the latter half of the nineteenth century - San Francisco's fledgling society of the 1860s, the literary scene in New York and Boston in the 1870s, the Reconstruction South, and the Continent and British Isles through the turn of the twentieth century. As a fiction writer, playwright, and diplomat, Harte knew, sometimes intimately, many of the most prominent women and men of his day, including such writers as Mark Twain and Henry James, such actors as Lawrence Barrett and Annie Russell, and such politicians as John Hay and Herbert Bismarck. This unexpurgated edition of Bret Harte's letters, the first in more than seventy years, chronicles the life of a pioneering western American writer who became a creature of the literary marketplace. Among other life events, the edition details Harte's increasingly troubled relationship with Samuel Clemens and includes all known letters from Harte to Clemens.