If you’re looking for storytelling that focuses solely on the current struggles and triumphs of the contemporary American West, James Thomas and Seth Horton have revived a series that’s for you.
Best of the West 2010: New Stories from the Wide Side of the Missouri offers 19 stories with death as a common thread—from Sherman Alexie’s narrator singing a death song to the death of the fish in Rick Bass’s story to the coming-of-age story by William Kittredge of a boy who has lost both his father and his grandfather. Law-and-order fans will enjoy tracing the reasons why, or why not, the characters in these stories become laws unto themselves.