This is a powerful debut novel about Lydia Pasternak, a precocious fifteen-year-old whose life—for better or worse—is irrevocably changed when her older brother, Danny, disappears. In the year following Danny's disappearance, his parents go off the rails, his town buzzes with self-indulgent mourning, and his little sister Lydia finds herself thrust into unwanted celebrity, forced to negotiate her complicated—often ambivalent —grief for a brother she never particularly liked but who is suddenly gone.  Embraced by Danny’s friends, forgotten by her parents, and drawn into the missing-person investigation by her family’s intriguing private eye, Lydia both blossoms and struggles to find herself during Danny’s absence. But when a trail of clues leads to a shocking outcome in her brother’s case, the teenaged Lydia and the adult she will become are forever changed, even as she reluctantly prepares to return to her hometown ten years later.  An honest look at how a crisis affects the daily life of one family in suburban America, The Local News is a haunting narrative that explores the complicated bond between siblings and proves that not all tragedies have a hero.

Miriam Gershow graduated from the Program in Creative Writing at the University of Oregon and was a Fiction Fellow at the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing. Her stories have appeared in the Georgia Review, Black Warrior Review, and Quarterly West, among other literary journals. She lives in Eugene, Oregon, where she teaches in the English Department at The University of Oregon.

The March 25th edition of the Chuckanut Radio Hour will have a real Western theme. Our guest authors, Mark Spragg and Laura Bell, hale from Wyoming and their books are strong evocations of the Western landscape. Ron Hardesty will bring his own style of music with a distinctive Western flavor and we'll have Cowboy Poetry in the Poet's Corner. The show, which will take place in the Leopold's Crystal Ballroom, begins with music at 6:30 and taping at 7pm (we ask that everyone be seated by 6:45). Tickets are $5 and are available at the store and online at Brown Paper Tickets. Buy either book at Village Books (in -store purchases only) prior to the event, and receive a free ticket to the show. We hope to see you as we begin another fun season of the Chuckanut Radio Hour.

Bone Fire by Mark Spragg

What the cast of Spragg’s characters have to contend with on a daily basis in their tiny Wyoming town is bracing enough, involving car accidents, runaway children, strokes and Lou Gehrig’s disease, not to mention the motorcycle rallies and rodeos that flood the tiny local jail. But as their lives become even more strained, hardship foments exceptional compassion and generosity, and those caught in their own sorrow alleviate the same in others, changing themselves as they do so. In this gripping story, along with harsh truths and difficult consolation come moments of hilarity and surprise and beauty. No one writes more compellingly about the modern West than Mark Spragg, and in Bone Fire he is at the very height of his powers.

Mark Spragg is the author of Where Rivers Change Direction, a memoir that won the Mountains & Plains Booksellers Award, and the novels The Fruit of Stone and An Unfinished Life, which was chosen by the Rocky Mountain News as the Best Book of 2004. All three were top-ten Book Sense selections and have been translated into fifteen languages. He lives with his wife, Virginia, in Wyoming.

Claiming Ground by Laura Bell
“In a sheep wagon, called an ark, parked under cottonwoods along a creek in Wyoming, Laura Bell began the life she came west to find. Decades later, after seasons spent with sheep, cows, horses, and dogs, after a failed marriage, death, and grief, she now works to protect the place of her heart as a conservationist.  Love, she says, never seems to be enough until we decide that it is.  This is a wonderfully written, refreshing story.”—William Kittredge

“First, it is the language you notice: phrases, whole passages composed with the musical authority of psalms.  Then it is the evocation of place, Wyoming rising from these pages as actual as a wild perfume.  But, start to finish, it is her honesty that keeps you up in the night, wondering at the frailty of what it means to be human and glad and brave and, at times, broken. Laura Bell’s Claiming Ground is the finest memoir I’ve read.”—Mark Spragg

Laura Bell’s work has been published in several collections, and from the Wyoming Arts Council she has received two literature fellowships as well as the Neltje Blanchan Memorial Award and the Frank Nelson Doubleday Memorial Award. She lives in Cody, and since 2000 has worked there for the Nature Conservancy.