Books

The 19 short stories in New Stories From the Southwest vary greatly in tone, subject matter and length, but they all share one key element: each author's unreserved fascination – one might almost call it obsession – with the land itself and how it influences its inhabitants.

Editor D. Seth Horton chose the stories from nearly 200 periodicals published in 2006, including New England Review, Colorado Review, Crazy Horse and Prairie Schooner. The Southwest herein illuminated includes Arizona, New Mexico and portions of Utah, Colorado, Texas, Nevada and California.

It seems odd that these gems were collected and published by the decidedly non-Southwestern Swallow Press/Ohio University Press, but readers should be grateful they noticed.

Contributors with Texas connections abound: Matt Clark, Marcela Fuentes, Ray Gonzalez (who wrote the foreword), Anna Green, Donald Lucio Hurd, Toni Jensen, Tom McWhorter and John Tait all were either born here or, as adopted Texans like to say, got here as fast as they could.

NPR commentator Alan Cheuse, whose fine tribute to Ansel Adams, "Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico, 1941," opens the collection, isn't a Texan, but he contributes often to The Dallas Morning News book pages.

The late Mr. Clark – he died at 31 in 1998 – starts his "The Secret Heart of Christ" with a marvelous twist: "This is not a story." Then, a long paragraph later, "This is a story." He alternates this way, teasing the reader to ferret out truth from fiction, and bringing up the prickly question of whether that line is finer than we'd like to admit.

It's set mostly in a historic adobe church in Taos, N.M., where a group of Southern Methodist University students, whom the narrator clearly loathes, are doing summer volunteer work. He wastes no time in savaging them and their ways, saying of one fraternity in particular: "Let me jump to my point: they are racist, sexist, homophobic, spoiled-rotten white boys who think they have a claim to greatness because they are pale."

John Tait, who teaches at the University of North Texas in Denton, closes the collection with the amusing, sardonically self-deprecating first-person "Reasons for Concern Regarding My Girlfriend of Five Days, Monica Garza."

Under the subheading, "Notable Insecurities at the Two-Week Mark With New Girlfriend, Monica Garza," he nails the dread most writers feel of the accidental critic, someone who isn't literary, perhaps, but who sees any weaknesses in one's writing with deadly acuity:

"Because when I finally convinced her to read chapters from my latest unpublished novel, she at first declined to comment then said mildly that my characters seem to have much free time, and they spent a lot of it staring into the rain and agonizing over decisions they would never make or staring into the rain and contemplating actions they would never take." Ouch.

Mr. Horton picked well; these stories so assuredly conjure the Southwest the authors' pens might as well have been dipped in cactus juice, tobacco spit or tequila. The traditions of American Indians, Tejanos, even the occasional Yankee transplant are documented with a tempered mix of reverence and impudence.

D. Seth Horton, editor

(Swallow Press/Ohio University Press, $32.95 hardcover, $16.95 paperback)

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