Sister Coyote: Montana Stories - Hardcover

Set in small-town Montana of the Vietnam era and the present day, these short stories, linked by character and place, are populated by men and women in conflict - with their own desires, with each other, and with their alternately beautiful and harsh landscape. Hunting is a theme throughout - deer poaching by spotlight, coyote hunting by airplane, being hunted by a cougar, hunting for love. In the funny, poignant "Suzanne, Take Me Down," a man trapped in the "stale tail end" of his life seeks redemption in the form of a fallen-from-grace girl from a strict religious sect. In "Bears and Lions" a cougar is the living symbol of all the forces that threaten a family trying to hold onto their ranch in a changing West. "Varia's Revenge" features a sixty-year-old woman's unexpected triumph over the hunter who mistook her mare for a deer. And the title novella is a devastating tour de force that traces the intersecting paths of a female coyote, a coyote hunter, and a divorced mother who drifts, over increasing humiliations, into madness and attempted murder. Sister Coyote offers haunting, richly textured fiction from a writer who "is on many people's best western writing short list" (The Los Angeles Times Book Review). (61/4 X 91/4, 220 pages)

Mary Clearman Blew's short stories have appeared in the O. Henry Prize collection and The Best American Short Stories. Her previous books include Bone Deep in Landscape: Essays on Writing, Reading, and Place, the family memoirs All But the Waltz and Balsamroot, and two short-story collections. She grew up in Montana and now teaches creative writing at the University of Idaho.