Kirjahaku

This book tells the tale of the tortoise and the hare with a southwestern flair.

Tortoise, living comfortably in her home on Slow Lane, awakens one morning feeling good and challenges cocky Jackrabbit to a race. Patiently bumping her way through the desert landscape, Tortoise heads for the finish line as Jackrabbit cheerfully skips - and sleeps.

Everyone knows the story of the three little pigs. This book features the three little javelinas - wild, southwestern cousins of pigs. Living in homes of built of tumbleweeds and cacti, the first two javelinas are soon running from the hungry coyote, who had hoped to eat them with red chili sauce. Where do they go for shelter?

Lavina Cumming has spent her entire first ten years of life on the Bosque Ranch in Arizona Territory, but when her mother dies, she must go live with her aunt in Santa Cruz, California. Armed with the Cumming family motto, “Courage,” Lavina starts off at dawn on September 16, 1905, leaving behind everything that is familiar. She arrives in a world of two-story houses, automobiles, a new school, and her cousin, “awful Aggie.” Trying her best to settle in, Lavina is as shocked as everyone else by the great earthquake that nearly demolishes the nearby city of San Francisco. In the aftermath of the quake, she must make a big decision about her future. Based on the true story of the author’s grandmother, I Am Lavina Cumming offers a compelling look at life in early twentieth-century California and a girl struggling to find her place there.

Winner of the George Garrett Fiction Prize, Susan Lowell's Two Desperados is a collection of southwest-flavored stories that feature a blacksmith, several smugglers, a mule, a jaguar, a runaway groom, a murderess, a witch, a basket weaver, a Gremlin, three cowboys, and a ghost. Settings range from a grand university library to a construction site, from an apocalyptic dream world to the coyote-haunted banks of the Rio Grande. A novella called "Captain Death" traces a journalist's odyssey along the U.S.-Mexico border. Another novella, "Two Desperados," follows a prodigal daughter's return to her eccentric Arizona home. And although they grapple with love and death, many members of this motley gang still manage to find sparkles in the darkness and a few crazy moments of grace. These eighteen stories play a few games with traditional short story form, but by and large they remain in the realism camp-yet it is realism tweaked or enlivened with an occasional sprinkle of magic or a small electric zap. In length they range from a few words to many pages, from the brief text of a bumper sticker to a full-scale novella. In the words of Apuleius, author of The Golden Ass: "Reader! Pay attention! You're going to enjoy yourself!

From KIRKUS REVIEWS: Lowell collects a novella and eight short stories, primarily set in various eras of the American Southwest. In "The Kill," a Montanan's choice of college is on the other side of the country, in Princeton, New Jersey, but he doesn't stray far from his roots; he even keeps a hunting rifle under his bed, and his ways seem to fascinate his English professor. However, for the most part, a theme of shared experience threads through Lowell's book. In "Lavinia Peace," wife and mother Lynn has spent her life in the Western United States, unlike her single, free-spirited sister, Catherine. But the two share, via photos and letters, memories of their great-grandmother and her great love, George. Similarly, the titular novella follows myriad characters through decades in Arizona and New Mexico, all connected by a rug that Adjiba Yazzie first weaves in 1920. It changes hands and homes several times until the 1980s, and its discernible blood-red color signifies a unity among people who otherwise have no blood relation. The author's lyrical prose has a surreal quality; in "White Canyon," for example, a young girl in the 1950s suffers a fall, and the scene abruptly transitions to 1980, when she's living in Dallas with her husband and child. As an adult, she has headaches and seems to lose time, which may stem from radiation exposure when she was younger. But in all of Lowell's tales, her prose ignites the senses, such as in the description of a woman weeping over a stove and hearing "tears dropping upon the hot metal with faint hisses." Adjiba is described as enjoying working outside "under the broad blue sky" with the cottonwood trees' "fresh light green against the cinnamon sand." Scholes' simple but distinctive black-and-white sketches preface each story as well as each of the novella's five chapters. Incisive, profound, and colorful tales.Here, a striking first collection--eight stories and a novella--from Lowell, winner of the first Milkweed Editions National Fiction Prize. Lowell writes mostly about the American Southwest and shows more interest in terrain--both psychic and geographic--than plot. Tenses shift, time speeds up and slows down, and Lowell's characters often Fall down existential rabbit-holes of memory, fear, or angst. These stories have an almost dreamlike movement but, grounded as they are in precise and poetic detail, they remain convincingly real. The narrator of ""White Canyon"" shares her nostalgic memories of childhood in a Utah uranium-mining camp: along with more innocuous scenes, there's the chattering of Geiger counters during a fallout storm. Then the story jumps to the present, with the narrator's hospitalization and discovery of a brain tumor. All of a sudden, her memories are not merely nostalgic, but an attempt to make sense of experience and perception. Lowell is adept at presenting cross-sections of society: ""Los Mojados"" looks at the relationships between two generations of Anglo ranchers, Mexican cowboys, and illegal aliens; ""Wild Pigs"" charts the reactions of five different households to the javelinas that appear in a one-time desert wilderness now developed for condos, highways and Pizza Huts; the novella ""Ganado Red,"" in five storylike chapters, follows a Navajo rug from the hands of the woman who weaves it in 1920. through the hands of the various people who buy it up until 1981. An impressive debut--and a splendid start for the Milkweed Editions contest.

Josefina the Javelina moves from the desert to california to pursue her dream of becoming a ballerina.