Director Sam Peckinpah was just starting out when MGM released Ride the High Country in 1962. He was a new kind of director: young, brash, and in a hurry to help the Western "grow up" by treating it with adult themes. Ride the High Country was something new and different, a changing Western to match a changing West. Stars Randolph Scott and Joel McCrea were old hands at this sort of thing. Ride the High Country gave the two veteran actors one last job to do and a chance to go out with some dignity. Ride the High Country helped the genre mature and adapt to turbulent, changing times. It launched Peckinpah's career by invoking the themes of honor, loyalty, and compromised ideals, the destruction of the West and its heroes, and the difficulty of doing right in an unjust world--themes developed to their pinnacle in Peckinpah's later masterpiece, The Wild Bunch.

All Taylor Brand wanted was a baby of her own But at nearly forty and recently divorced, embarking on a "solo" trek on the Continental Divide Trail, her time was tight and her options slim. Maybe the curt cowboy who'd been charged with watching out for her was her best shot. After all, Clint McAllister was shadowing her on a high-country horseback trip for the money. Would he be up for being hired for something else? Classy ladies like Taylor didn't normally give a rough rodeo-rider like him a second glance…much less ask him to father a baby. And while Clint didn't need an excuse to take Taylor to bed, he did wonder if this plan was perhaps the wisest. Who knew what would happen once he got to taste the forbidden?

While given no reason young Saina was banished to the Sulatin monastery. In a decade since, his only achievement-unknown to anyone-is his ability to enter the divine world of Goddessoma. One night in that world he is shown an unthinkable war raging in his homeland Satamabode. Meanwhile his dying father leaves him a sacred scroll for an equally sacred mission-halt the war's devastation and restore the Ten Abodes. It sounded good, but quickly Saina is stripped of the scroll by the ferines in the Garland Forest, shunned by his Sulatin masters in Prayadevale, and severed from his only ally in neighboring Ryadabode. He's not a warrior, not a leader-only a lone young monk, and no one believes can do it. He dare not say his only chance requires capturing aetheric powers hidden in the Body of the Goddess. Welcome to Goddessoma is one of the forceful and fascinating metaphysical fantasy novels in TM White's Goddess Trilogy.

Winner of the 2020 Reading the West Advocacy Award Winner of the 2020 Colorado Book Award for Creative Nonfiction "This is a book for all of us, right now." —Cheryl Strayed, author of Wild On her 120-acre homestead high in the Colorado Rockies, beloved writer Pam Houston learns what it means to care for a piece of land and the creatures on it. Elk calves and bluebirds mark the changing seasons, winter temperatures drop to 35 below, and lightning sparks a 110,000-acre wildfire, threatening her century-old barn and all its inhabitants. Through her travels from the Gulf of Mexico to Alaska, she explores what ties her to the earth, the ranch most of all. Alongside her devoted Irish wolfhounds and a spirited troupe of horses, donkeys, and Icelandic sheep, the ranch becomes Houston’s sanctuary, a place where she discovers how the natural world has mothered and healed her after a childhood of horrific parental abuse and neglect. In essays as lucid and invigorating as mountain air, Deep Creek delivers Houston’s most profound meditations yet on how “to live simultaneously inside the wonder and the grief… to love the damaged world and do what I can to help it thrive.”

n this collection of 14 speculative short stories, author A.A. Garrison takes us to Ford, North Carolina, a sleepy little mountain town named after a Civil War deserter. Though out of the way, the town seems to attract an immoderate share of the fantastic and the macabre. Amongst Ford's citizens are: -Blake ("The Fifty"), who purchases revenge with a fifty-dollar bill -Candy Patrice ("Cloyed"), a young woman who adopts a most unorthodox diet-plan -Mara Dees ("Additive Free"), star in a grisly scheme to appease visitors from outer space -Johannes Bitter ("Half Dead"), an undertaker with an exceptional case of lady trouble -The Doctor ("See Sick"), a roving voyeur who sees more than he bargains for -Frank Belmont ("Dead End"), who goes hunting for nostalgia and finds trouble -Brian ("Brian, Destroyer of Worlds"), who commits murder by coffee -Zedok Crane ("The Package"), amnesic serial killer extraordinaire -The Narrator ("The Center"), a man who saw the face of God And more ...

David Carpenter's stories often begin in a comic mode, and the voices of the characters, their accents, tones and peculiar vocabularies, are brilliantly caught. But what begins as comedy can frequently veer into fierceness, farce, regret or indignation. On these unpredictable journeys, we meet an amorous Texas millionaire and his native fishing guide, a cow named Turkle, a farm girl who talks to bears, a kokum who speaks with departed spirits, a German scholar with a taste for saskatoon berries, an all-Jewish football team that takes a chance on a goy, an aboriginal folksinger who finds love in a laundry dryer and loses it in a motel, a monster northern pike named Adolph, a shy roaring-twenties photographer who hates dogs and loves peppermints. Most of Carpenter's characters are city people who find themselves out in the bush with the bear, deer, elk and wolves, and sometimes even Windigo. Carpenter has a strong relationship with the wild country of the northern boreal forest, the Saskatchewan prairies and the Alberta foothills. His prose is protean. It shifts into the minds and the voices of his characters and gathers the reader along to unexpected destinations: grief, joy, or a nicely shaded triumph often involving love, escape or an unexpected kind of revelation. Since 1975, with the exception of four years split between Toronto and Vancouver Island, Carpenter has lived and written in Saskatoon. He has been nominated and won numerous literary accolades for his work, including fiction, nonfiction and poetry. Until recently he was fiction editor for "Grain" Magazine.

Her old college crush in Canyon Springs When Olivia Diaz promised her parents she'd manage their mountain cabin resort for the summer, she thought she'd find some direction for her life. She didn't expect to be working side by side with Rob McGuire. Rob's as handsome--and as guarded--as ever. Can free spirit Olivia get him to open up about his life, his faith...his mysterious past? Because the more time they spend together, the more Olivia realizes Rob could be Mr. Forever.