Greetings,A quick note that the anthology LOST TRAILS, which I co-edited with Martin H. Greenberg is now available on Amazon.Com and should be in stores any day now.
With brand new stories from Elmer Kelton, Loren D. Estleman, Johnny Boggs, Don Coldsmith and many others, I'm quite proud of this book. The introduction is available on the Kensington website here: http://www.kensingtonbooks.com/finditem.cfm?itemid=11178.
And, of course, you can go straight over to Amazon and order yourself a copy here: http://www.amazon.com/Lost-Trails-Louis-LAmour/dp/0786018240.
Obviously, I can't review my own anthology (that would be... cheating) but I think this is a good one and I hope the folks reading this blog will spread the word and go out and get a copy for themselves. Keeping Westerns going includes short stories - and there just aren't very many outlets left for short westerns these days.
Thanks for letting me indulge in a bit of shameless self-promotion, and have a great day!
Regards,
Russell Davis
4 comments:
I hope all those who have read this far will have taken the opportunity via the Kensington link to read what Russell has to say in his book's introduction. To me, as an inhabitant of the wider world, it serves as a timely reminder.
Western books and movies are/have been written and read, made and viewed everywhere, from China and India to Russia and Czechoslovakia, not to mention Britain and Germany and Indonesia, most populous Islamic nation in the world! Karl May, son of a Saxony weaver, is claimed by many to be the father of the western novel. (More about these topics in the upcoming June Hoofprint offerings at the blackhorsewesterns site.) The people in these places see the western as entertainment, as romantic escapism from their daily surroundings.
Many in the US probably do, too. I'm sure living in a city or suburb in America is similar to living in the same elsewhere -- certainly a lot more similar than to living on the American Frontier of the nineteenth century.
But there has to be an added dimension for Americans. It's conveyed in terms like "preserve our literary heritage", "uniquely American" and "who we are and where we came from".
There is nothing wrong with national pride, unless it descends to mere jingoism. However, a danger could emerge that reading westerns will become associated in young minds with patriotic duty and what "will be good for you and your country" as presented by authoritarian leaders. It will then be resisted. Such is the way of the young, remember?
My own feeling, as just another foreigner, is that the western-reading/viewing world at large will not want its entertainment tainted with latter-day political slants or messages of any stripe. On another blog today, a comment was made by an American now living abroad about the old Fawcett Gold Medal books. He was referring, by the way, not to westerns but to genre fiction in general:
"Some great work languished in (critical) obscurity in those books, but an awful lot of tacky and bad work sat between those covers. They weren't the sort of thing you'd want to admit you read. . . . Genres exist because their readers (including me) are drawn to those story elements and want to see them again and again. . . . Now, I'm a fussy reader. I want my thrills and chills, but I also want pace and storytelling, believable characterization and poetic use of the language. And a plot. And yeah, sometimes that does seem to be too much to ask."
It does . . . and if I'm to beat a drum, it will be for those things first.
Hmmm... I'm not 100% sure how to take all that. Was I making a politically/patriotically slanted statement in my introduction? If so, I certainly didn't intend that.
I've been studying literature of all kinds for a long time now, but I strongly believe that the Western is the only genre of fiction that America can truly lay claim to as its own. We have contributed to other forms, but not invented them.
I don't believe it's our patriotic duty to preserve that literary heritage. You're right - young people won't take anything like that. I do, however, believe it's our intellectual and maybe even our social/literary duty to preserve something as uniquely American as the Western by encouraging young readers to read them, see the movies, etc. - and then let them decide for themselves what they see in it.
A book is a book and a good book is a good book and all that. Yes, we must make demands of the form. Yes, we must insist on the quality of the craft and the art. But... it would be a horrendous failure on our part to let good books languish in obscurity or fade away entirely because we failed to point out any books at all.
I believe that one of the biggest challenges faced by young people today is a lack of leadership: in the home, in schools, in society as a whole. How are we to reasonably expect the next generation(s) to be better than we are, do more than we have, succeed where we have failed... if we do not lead them first to the proving grounds of the mind and of our history?
Cheers,
Russell
Yes, Russell -- you most definitely should be making strenuous attempts to save the western genre in the world's most developed marketplace. I'm right behind that. What I'm unsure about is the belief that the education system at the ordinary levels is the correct arena for these efforts. When previous generations were young, did they not find those books, those comics, those TV favorites for themselves? They were not chosen because they were teaching values. That may have been an incidental, but my understanding is that it wasn't stressed or something the audience was deliberately made aware of. And, had it been, it would for many have been a turn-off.
I would agree wholeheartedly, however, that you can lead horses to water. Sounds like your Pa was very good at that!
The "uniquely American" aspect is, for me, another difficulty and one that has all too readily been used by literary agents and editors as an excuse for operating a closed shop, regardless of other considerations. . . the books no editor would look at because the author's cover sheet revealed he lived in a suburb of London rather than a suburb of Chicago. The prior question today -- if there has to be one -- is how well has he/she researched the history/myths/accepted conventions?
And why should any nation need to lay claim to a genre? Does any country seriously do this for, say, detective or romance fiction? For science fiction?
In the here and now, it would seem almost a laughable irrelevancy, like trying to shut the stable door after the horse has bolted. The western's appeal and production has stretched around the globe, a movement owing much from its earliest days to foreign producers and writers; in short, to the nineteenth century's Karl Mays and their successors. To makers of spaghetti and other westerns.
Nor should we forget that today a publisher in London is producing 120 western novels a year -- an output not matched by any firm in New York as far as I'm aware.
This is a really valuable discussion, so I want to create a new post with my continuing thoughts on this matter. People won't be looking for this discussion under a post about LOST TRAILS.
We can continue from there!
Cheers,
Russell
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