Site Fidelity: Stories [Hardcover]

A 2022 Whiting Award Winner in Fiction Tracing a landscape of deserts, mountains, sagebrush, and ranches, this story collection evokes life in the contemporary American West. Boyless characters are steeped in a sense of connection to place and aware of the precariousness of their environment. Shot through with a nicely fatalist sense of humor, the stories press on the touchy question of just who best speaks for todays American Westthose who, in the pioneer tradition, view it as a realm of independence and opportunity or those who feel called upon to preserve it. [These 10 stories] offer an unrelenting clarity... This is the real stuff, adulthood at its most complex... Boyles weaves such knowledge deep into her narratives, choosing to end many of them in the middle, in the moment just before the trouble starts. It is a deft and daring choice. [ [Boyles's] settings exist as characters in their own right, carefully detailed, possessed of complex backstories, and imbued with definite, sometimes dangerous, agency...? These are tenderly, insightfully-told tales of the hardscrabble lives of women in the present-day West, their families and how nature influences those ties. If we are to survive, even the next several decades, we need to feminize the myth of the American West&Claire Boyless stories do just that, the tenacious, unsinkable women who inhabit them no longer content to sit back and let powerful men of industry make us all extinct. For anyone who loves and grieves the West, who isnt afraid to open their eyes and see her distress, these beautifully forged stories are as essential as water. In Attuned to harsh, western beauty and full of unforgettable, resilient characters, Claire Boyles grabs the myth of the American West and reinvents it&Each of her harrowing stories introduces us to a remote landscape where the world has begun to crumblesometimes literallyand yet the beauty of these places comes through, the hope of the people who live there comes l#B