Robert Franklin Gish

First Horses: Stories of the West

• Broschiertes Buch

Produktbeschreibung

Stories about "the West" are often associated with cattle drives, cowboy and Indian stand-offs, badmen in black hats, and rugged pioneers. First Horses: Stories of the New West is an original collection of fourteen short stories in which Robert F. Gish describes a multiethnic, contemporary West that encourages the reader to see beyond the stereotypes of the Old West. All of the stories depict the emotional and psychological costs of the prejudices and injustices of the Old West that have carried over into the twentieth-century New West. Gish's vivid storytelling technique utilizes compelling voices and gritty characters: the regulars at a small-town cafe; the local rodeo with its manly contests; the staged fiesta with its attempt to recreate traditions; a young stripper at a honky-tonk tavern; the classrooms and playgrounds of public schools with their mix of Anglo, Mexican American, and American Indian youths; and the fields where taboos of interracial romance evaporate into the cloudless blue sky and the churning, muddy irrigation waters of the Rio Grande. The unifying theme of these short stories is a subtle plea for harmony and mutual respect among the inhabitants and the landscapes. Violence, racism, sexism, and environmental pollution prove to be the remnants of earlier insensibilities, residues in need of recognition and disavowal. Many of these stories, told in varying voices of male and female, Anglo and Hispanic, young and old, trace this "recognition" along the turbulent paths of initiation as one generation learns about its own special concerns in the shared heritage of others. All fourteen stories in First Horses are set in the sometimes magical, sometimes brutal Southwest.Cutting through class and ethnicity, each story illustrates how a land and its history determine a people and are determined by them. Persons interested in the literature and history of the American West or in the New Ethnicity will enjoy the stories in First Horses.

Produktdetails

• Western Literature and Fiction
• Verlag: University of Nevada Press
• New
• Seitenzahl: 152
• Erscheinungstermin: April 1993
• Englisch
• Abmessung: 229mm x 153mm x 12mm
• Gewicht: 227g
• ISBN-13: 9780874172119
• ISBN-10: 087417211X
• Artikelnr.: 22127869

Autorenporträt

Robert F. Gish is the author of nearly twenty works of fiction, memoir, folktales, literary biographies and numerous monographs and essays on the literature, history, and culture of the American Southwest. His short story collections include Bad Boys and Black Sheep: Fateful Tales From the West (1996) and First Horses: Stories of the New West (1993). He taught at the University of Northern Iowa from 1967-1991, where he was University Distinguished Scholar and Professor of English. He served as Director of Ethnic Studies and Professor of English and Ethnic Studies at California Polytechnic State University in San Luis Obispo from 1991-2001. He holds B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. in English and American Studies from the University of New Mexico. He is the recipient of the Erna Fergusson Distinguished Alumni Award from UNM. Of Cherokee-Anglo American descent, Gish is a member of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma, Pen West, the Authors Guild, and the Screen Actors Guild. He lives with his wife, Judith, in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Gish and his wife are the parents of three children and have five grandchildren. He is a jazz guitarist and vocalist by avocation. Please visit his website: www.robertfgish.com.