While I'm waiting for the ground to thaw and the march winds to die down I've been reading some of my old favorites. Right Now I'm reading Larry McMurtry's Still Wild, a compilation of featured short works involving the western landscape and way of life from various writer's of the modern literary tradition.. Refreshing is that you won't find the old standby's that romantisize the west: L'amour or Zane Grey, but a sometimes 'gritty' realisim of writers like Jack Kerouac, James Dickey & William Stanton. kst

Here's a few lines from the publisher, Simon and Schuster:

Featuring a veritable Who's Who of the century's most distinctive writers, this collection effectively departs from the standard superstars of the Western genre. McMurtry has chosen a refreshing range of work that, when taken as a whole, depicts the evolution and maturation of Western writing over several decades. The featured tales are not so concerned with the American West of history and geography as they are with the American West of the imagination -- one that is alternately comic, gritty, individual, searing, and complex.