Ghosts of Wyoming: Stories

by Alyson Hagy

Book Overview

An unsentimental vision of the west, new and old, comes to life in a gritty new collection of stories by the author of Snow, Ashes In Ghosts of Wyoming , Alyson Hagy explores the hardscrabble lives... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1555975488
• ISBN13: 9781555975487
• Release Date: February 2010
• Publisher: Graywolf Press
• Length: 192 Pages
• Weight: 0.60 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.5" x 5.5" x 8.3"

Customer Reviews

Great beauty carved from an unforgiving landscape

The eight, spare, elegant short stories in Alyson Hagy's new collection, Ghosts of Wyoming left me haunted too at the end. Hagy has sculpted her writing down to such leanness that, if she had written a few words less here and there, I'd have been lost. But instead, I was drawn down by the tow of her words and became part of the scene. I didn't care what the characters said or did; I just wanted to be with them. It takes powerful writing to make me so docile. Now, having finished the book, here I am, back in my own dull head, trying to hear the thoughts of the people in Hagy's. What an achievement for a writer, to make a cynical, hard-nosed reader like me long to give up my world for hers. My favorites among the stories: `How Bitter the Weather', `Oil & Gas', `The Lost Boys' and `The Brief Lives of the Trainmen' which I think is a masterpiece. In Hagy's `Acknowledgments' she says the idea for `Trainmen' came from Plutarch's short biographies of Roman heroes. In ten short sections, she profiles the tough, sinewy men of a railroad crew as they lay track across Wyoming Territory in the late 1800's. In this scene, the crew's young callboy--a walking alarm clock--makes his way through a bunk car early in the morning. Hagy conjures it all up with her nose: The callboy monkeys his way up the grab bars and swings into the stink of the first car still lugging his belongings, which he hopes to leave under the blanket on Billy Dolph's bunk. Farts, oil of Macassar, whiskey distilled through unwashed skin. The smell of tumored liver in the vicinity of poor Pascal. Creosote, harness soap, tobacco marinated in spit. Bay rum and sweat above Nattie Finn. The odorous assault of Peg Farland's remaining foot. Mold stewed from wet belches and canvas. The callboy touches shoulders and tugs at pant legs. He ducks the slaps and punches that come from the sweltering dark. And in `The Little Saint of Hoodoo Mountain' there's this brilliant paragraph near the beginning of the story, when Livia, a young teenager, joins her father one morning as he's out checking fence on the western edge of their ranch: Her father gave her a peck on the cheek. "How are you, Liv? Did you get breakfast? Is your ma awake?" He'd been like this as long as she could remember, careful, good mannered. What it brought him, as far as she could tell, was a clean, white dignity he could sail above his griefs. That last phrase has all the power of fine poetry. It stays in my mind like a fetish. Or another ghost.

Original and sublime

How I found it: my library posts every day a link to "just ordered, coming soon" and this book was there. Hmmmm, I thought, Annie Proulx has this locked up; wonder how this Alyson Hagy will tell Wyoming stories. Original and sublime are two powerful words. I absolutely adore almost all of these stories--6 out of 8. I have a major peeve with movies--they are often, very often, over-musicked. My major peeve with writing is that writers go crazy with adjectives. They seem to believe the more adjectives attached to a noun, the better the writing, the deeper the insight. No no no. The one perfect (killer) adjective preceding a noun is the best. Not minimalist, but so full in its import that I have to stop for a second and take a breath. Hagy does it time and time again. To throw in some examples out of context will not do justice, will not thrill as it thrills when occurring in the course of the sentence or paragraph. If this means anything to you, if sentences or parts of sentences make you reel then you must read Ghosts of Wyoming. To be fair and not overly rigid, sometimes a string of descriptive adjectives works--it just gets old to see the same form, almost always 3 in a row separated by commas. So when a writer breaks the conventional pattern and does it brilliantly, it is quite special.