Read Ebook {PDF EPUB} Crow Fair Stories by Thomas McGuane "Crow Fair": Thomas McGuane's new short story collection examines the dark side of the human comedy. The antic storytelling of a modest master finds mischievous fun in the romance and family life of the American West. Thomas McGuane lives on a Montana ranch. He is a fly fisherman and has written a book, "The Longest Silence," about same. He is a member of the Hall of Fame of the National Cutting Horse Association in Texas. (For those readers lacking both hat and cattle: Cutting is a rodeo event wherein riders are judged on their prowess at separating one animal from a herd.) He counts among his wives (not concurrent) the actress Margot Kidder and Jimmy Buffett’s sister Laurie. In the 1970s, when McGuane partied with the likes of Buffett, Peter Fonda, and Sam Peckinpah, he was nicknamed Captain Berserko. Today, at 75, he looks like a cross between the World’s Greatest Grandpa and the Marlboro Man. To McGuane’s admirers, all of this may be about as interesting or as germane to literary exegesis as Hemingway’s fondness for bullfights and rum. But despite McGuane’s induction into the American Academy of Arts and Letters, he is not quite a household name. For readers new to his work, his back-story is liable either to raise inappropriate expectations or, worse, to be just plain off-putting. Those hoping that Crow Fair , McGuane’s new short story collection, contains life-on-the-range tales in the spirit of Louis L’Amour or Larry McMurtry will be disappointed. Those concerned that it does are advised that its western setting is the backdrop to funny, antic, and affecting stories of growing up, of romantic and family life, and of finding or failing to find one’s place in the world. That is not to say that the stories in "Crow Fair" are western only in setting. A number of them treat particularly western subject matter. The protagonist of “Motherlode,” one of the finest and wildest stories in this wild bunch, artificially inseminates ranchers’ cattle for a living, “detecting and synchronizing estrus, handling frozen semen, [and] keeping breeding records.” In “Prairie Girl,” McGuane follows a resourceful prostitute’s progress from a “cow town” brothel called the Butt Hut to a new life and identity. “River Camp” shows a guided fishing trip going horribly, hilariously wrong. Szabo, in “The Good Samaritan,” operates a “property” – he prefers not to call it a ranch – producing “racehorse-quality alfalfa hay for a handful of grateful buyers.” The book’s title story, “Crow Fair,” turns on events at a Native American fair held annually near Billings, Montana. Yet McGuane is anything but a regional writer, as he possesses a range and psychological insight that could be applied to characters anywhere, in any circumstances. “Hubcaps” and “Weight Watchers” are two stories that make this particularly clear. “Hubcaps” is a deft and subtle rendering of the way a boy is transformed by his parents’ marital dissolution. A scene in which the boy, Owen, hunts for arrowheads with the father of some local children, quietly demonstrates the way life sometimes forces us to seek connection outside the family circle: “My boys don’t care” about arrowheads, the man says, “but maybe you’d like to come along.” This is no Hallmark Channel movie, however, and the story’s ending darkly suggests the inadequacy of such connections, if not of connection itself. “Weight Watchers,” despite being as funny as “Hubcaps” is troubling, is similarly strong on the strange ways in which we are shaped by family relationships. The narrator must take in his father, a loud, profane, blustering Vietnam veteran – think Walter Sobchak of "The Big Lebowski" – who has been kicked out of his home until he can get his weight under control. In the course of some rather strained father-son interactions, it comes to light that Dad is also an inveterate philanderer; the narrator’s parents, he informs us, have “been claiming to be contemplating divorce for half of my lifetime. I have found myself stuck in the odd trope of opposing the idea just to please them.” Here the father justifies a lap dance: Inheritance, fairness, and the billionaire class. “I’m aware that the world has changed in my lifetime and I’m interested in those changes. I went to this occasion as . as . almost as an investigator.” “You might want to withhold the results of your research from Mom.” “How dare you raise your voice to me!” “Jump you and jump you again. Checkers isn’t fun if you don’t pay attention.” Humor aside, “Weight Watchers” is not especially sanguine about the effects of being raised by such a man, and it shows us a narrator in depressing denial about those effects. He knows he’ll “never marry” and that he is “unable to imagine letting anyone new stay in [his] house for more than a night – and preferably not a whole night.” The story’s final line is an understated indictment of bad parenting that would do Philip “This Be the Verse” Larkin proud. Difficult relationships are at the heart of "Crow Fair ," but a few of the stories are about utterly, spectacularly failed ones. The aforementioned “River Camp,” which is along with “Motherlode” the book’s most straightforwardly entertaining and high-tension tale, pits two brothers-in-law with a barely suppressed enmity against an unhinged river guide and the perils of nature. One of the men “was thinking of how life and nature were just alike” at just the moment when life and nature are conspiring to swallow him whole. Nature – that is, weather – is also a bonus antagonist in “Canyon Ferry,” wherein a father’s reckless attempt to show off for his son deep-sixes their precarious relationship. “The Casserole” is a very short but memorable story about a cringe-making kiss-off. McGuane has a marked fondness for misfits, going back to the hero of his sidesplitting, picaresque second novel, "The Bushwhacked Piano," in 1971. His knack for making them both plausible and sympathetic is rivaled only by, say, Charles Portis and Sam Lipsyte. “Motherlode,” an antic and brilliant piece of crime writing, features a villain of the “born loser” variety and a hero who is, unfortunately, not much luckier. The furious, alienated, socially maladroit astronomer of “Stars” is as potent a Madwoman in the Attic figure as anyone has written. And the baroquely self- pitying alcoholic narrator of “Grandma and Me” is a diabolical joy to read. Get the Monitor Stories you care about delivered to your inbox. One of McGuane’s great gifts is the ability to elicit laughter in dark moments or to jolt the reader of an ostensibly comic tale with a knife twist of pathos or tragedy. “On a Dirt Road” seems to be about the misery of meeting terrible new neighbors but is really, like many of these stories, about infidelity. “Shaman” reads at first like a riff on New Age nonsense – “It had taken seven years for the two Rudys to track each other down and become the united Rudy now standing before Juanita and touching a button of her blouse for emphasis” – before taking an unexpectedly troubling turn. Then again, the reader of "Crow Fair" learns before long that the only thing he can expect is to be surprised – by McGuane’s deadpan wit, his hyperactive imagination, and his deep appreciation for the human comedy. His characters, always locking horns with life, recall the grotesques of another superficially “regional” author, Flannery O’Connor. As with her fiction, McGuane’s serves not merely to make us gape or laugh at man’s essential weirdness but also to recognize a bit of it in ourselves. The wildest frontiers are always, it turns out, disturbingly close at hand. Thomas McGuane, “Crow Fair” Montana Noir (Akashic Books) turned me on to Thomas McGuane’s compelling “Motherlode” and that sent me to his latest short-story collection, Crow Fair , which also includes that short story. Yes, I read it again. Four times? Five? It keeps on giving. I found one other story in Crow Fair on par with “Motherlode,” a taut battle of survival and justice-by-nature in the great outdoors with the understated title “River Camp,” but the entire collection is worth reading. Montana is the general backdrop, but scrap your Western clichés. McGuane’s characters are real world. They have their feet on the ground, loose as that foothold might be. Horizons are modest, dreams more so. Most McGuane characters accept their meagre lot. Those that push the envelope face consequences for their ambition, such as Dave in “Motherlode.” If all the characters in these stories could get together and compare notes, the collective analysis might suggest it’s a good idea for everyone to keep their head down and stay put. The Montanascape stands in for all-American hard knocks and earthy grit. The titles alone suggest the turf, from “Hubcaps” and “On a Dirt Road” to “The House on Sand Creek” and “An Old Man Who Liked to Fish.” Bleak? Maybe. Entertaining? Yes. In spots, harrowing. Though for maximum action and story, head to “Motherlode” and “River Camp.” McGuane’s stories feel so matter-of-fact. The writing is non-flashy; easy-going. Not every story comes with a twist or a jolt ending. McGuane mixes up the moods and flavors. Darkness ebbs and flows. The characters are often loners and misanthropes. Many ponder the next opportunity to pound a couple of “stiff ones.” McGuane doesn’t shine his prose on celebrities or town leaders. Family and economic strife abound. For every flash of upward mobility, as in “Prairie Girl,” there is a whole bunch of sideways and down. There are story summaries of this collection elsewhere, but for me “Motherlode” is the collection’s, well, gem. Its 28 pages could be 280 if you wanted to blow this up, stretch it out. But McGuane goes for taut (no wonder it fit perfectly in the Montana Noir collection, too.) Like many of the other stories in Crow Fair it’s about rebirth. Our hero Dave, in fact, is very good at grasping (literally) life at birth. He is an expert at “detecting and synchronizing estrus.” After several false career starts and only finishing high school, Dave discovers he is a “genius preg tester.” Dave is so talented, he can detect a fetus at two months, “when the calf was smaller than a mouse.” Dave’s keen sense of weight in his hands comes in handy when he holds the gun owned by a guy named Ray, who has forced Dave to drive him far out into the countryside to meet a woman in a sort of low-key kidnapping. When Dave gets his chance to hold the gun, he realizes it’s a fake. A prop. At the same time, Dave has a growing feeling that his own life needs a jolt. Dave feels like the only thing he has accomplished in his life is high school. Ray’s destination is this woman, Morsel. He met her online. She lives with her father Weldon in a “a two-story ranch building barely hanging on to its last few chips of paint.” Dave delivers Ray but hangs around and it slowly dawns on him, especially given the lack of serious threat from Ray’s fake weapon, that he might have been handed an opportunity that he shouldn’t pass up. Morsel is involved in a drug-running scheme that might prove lucrative, selling bootleg OxyContin in the Bakken oil field. “Motherlode” is compressed. It has been squeezed dry of excess. (I’m only touching on the essence of the plot.) For most part, the dialogue is in brisk snippets. And then Dave and Ray are talking after dinner in their room. Dave has just informed Ray he knows the gun is a fake. Ray seems only mildly concerned that his stunt has been revealed. And then Ray, after returning from taking a leak off the porch, launches into a monologue that is a piece of work. It’s hilarious, sad, colorful, detailed, and imaginative. Ray recounts his erstwhile acting career, right down some stints in community theater, and more adventures, too. “Got married, had a baby girl, lost my job, got another one, went to Hawaii as a steward on a yacht belonging to a movie star, who was working at a snow-cone stand a year before the yacht, the coke, the babes, and the wine. I had to sign a nondisclosure agreement, but then I got into a fight with the movie star and got kicked off the boat at Diamond Head.” The monologue opens up Dave’s mind about his own career trajectory and, even as Dave realizes Ray is born liar, the die is cast. Dave makes a run to cross-country drive to Modesto to demonstrate his value to Ray and Morsel, refusing to acknowledge his natural talents. “He drove straight through, or nearly so. He stopped briefly in Idaho, Utah, and Nevada to walk among cows. His manner with cattle was so familiar that they didn’t run from him but gathered around in benign expectation. David sighed and jumped back in the car. He declined to pursue this feeling of regret.” Cookie Consent and Choices. NPR’s sites use cookies, similar tracking and storage technologies, and information about the device you use to access our sites (together, “cookies”) to enhance your viewing, listening and user experience, personalize content, personalize messages from NPR’s sponsors, provide social media features, and analyze NPR’s traffic. This information is shared with social media, sponsorship, analytics, and other vendors or service providers. See details. You may click on “ Your Choices ” below to learn about and use cookie management tools to limit use of cookies when you visit NPR’s sites. You can adjust your cookie choices in those tools at any time. If you click “ Agree and Continue ” below, you acknowledge that your cookie choices in those tools will be respected and that you otherwise agree to the use of cookies on NPR’s sites. Cookie Consent and Choices. NPR’s sites use cookies, similar tracking and storage technologies, and information about the device you use to access our sites (together, “cookies”) to enhance your viewing, listening and user experience, personalize content, personalize messages from NPR’s sponsors, provide social media features, and analyze NPR’s traffic. This information is shared with social media, sponsorship, analytics, and other vendors or service providers. See details. You may click on “ Your Choices ” below to learn about and use cookie management tools to limit use of cookies when you visit NPR’s sites. You can adjust your cookie choices in those tools at any time. If you click “ Agree and Continue ” below, you acknowledge that your cookie choices in those tools will be respected and that you otherwise agree to the use of cookies on NPR’s sites. CROW FAIR. Seventeen stories, straightforward but well-crafted, that cement McGuane’s reputation as the finest short story writer of Big Sky country—and, at his best, beyond. These days, McGuane’s writing could hardly be further from the showy, overwritten prose of his breakthrough novels like Ninety-two in the Shade (1973). His sense of humor remains, but it’s wiser, more fatalistic and more Twain-like; he writes beautifully about the wilderness but always with an eye on its destructive power. As with much of his recent fiction, most of the stories here are set in Montana and turn on relationships going bust. In “Hubcaps,” a young boy observes his parents’ breakup through the filter of baseball and football games, capturing the protagonist’s slowly emerging resentment; in “Lake Story,” a man’s long-running affair with a married woman collapses during an ill-advised public outing, exposing the thinness of the connections that united them; in “Canyon Ferry,” a divorced dad’s attempt to prove his intrepidness to his young son during an ice- fishing trip pushes them to the edge of disaster during a storm. One of the best stories in the collection, “River Camp,” displays McGuane’s skill at pairing emotional turmoil with the untamed outdoors, following two brothers-in-law whose attempt to get away from it all leads them to a tour guide of questionable mental stability, bears rustling through tents and plenty of exposed raw nerves about their marriages. “Stars” tells a similar story in a more interior mode, following an astronomer who increasingly fails to contain her anger at the workaday world—McGuane skillfully depicts the small but constant ways life goes off-plumb for her—and how she fumbles toward balance in the forest. The conflicts throughout this book are age-old—indeed, the title story evokes “Oedipus”—but McGuane’s clean writing and psychological acuity enliven them all. A slyly cutting batch of tales from a contemporary master. Pub Date: March 3, 2015. ISBN: 978-0-385-35019-8. Page Count: 288. Publisher: Knopf. Review Posted Online: Dec. 8, 2014. Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015. Share your opinion of this book. Did you like this book? More by Thomas McGuane. More About This Book. Dark and unsettling, this novel’s end arrives abruptly even as readers are still moving at a breakneck speed. THEN SHE WAS GONE. by Lisa Jewell ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 24, 2018. Ten years after her teenage daughter went missing, a mother begins a new relationship only to discover she can't truly move on until she answers lingering questions about the past. Laurel Mack’s life stopped in many ways the day her 15-year-old daughter, Ellie, left the house to study at the library and never returned. She drifted away from her other two children, Hanna and Jake, and eventually she and her husband, Paul, divorced. Ten years later, Ellie’s remains and her backpack are found, though the police are unable to determine the reasons for her disappearance and death. After Ellie’s funeral, Laurel begins a relationship with Floyd, a man she meets in a cafe. She's disarmed by Floyd’s charm, but when she meets his young daughter, Poppy, Laurel is startled by her resemblance to Ellie. As the novel progresses, Laurel becomes increasingly determined to learn what happened to Ellie, especially after discovering an odd connection between Poppy’s mother and her daughter even as her relationship with Floyd is becoming more serious. Jewell’s ( I Found You , 2017, etc.) latest thriller moves at a brisk pace even as she plays with narrative structure: The book is split into three sections, including a first one which alternates chapters between the time of Ellie’s disappearance and the present and a second section that begins as Laurel and Floyd meet. Both of these sections primarily focus on Laurel. In the third section, Jewell alternates narrators and moments in time: The narrator switches to alternating first-person points of view (told by Poppy’s mother and Floyd) interspersed with third-person narration of Ellie’s experiences and Laurel’s discoveries in the present. All of these devices serve to build palpable tension, but the structure also contributes to how deeply disturbing the story becomes. At times, the characters and the emotional core of the events are almost obscured by such quick maneuvering through the weighty plot. Dark and unsettling, this novel’s end arrives abruptly even as readers are still moving at a breakneck speed.