Far Enough: A Western in Fragments - Paperback

by Joe Wilkins (Author)

Though Joe Wilkins's new collection of short fiction set under the big Montana sky may have all the trappings of a traditional Western-long shots of sage flats and blue mountains, late nights at the dingy local watering hole, and a hard-working cowboy making time with the boss's daughter-FAR ENOUGH is far from traditional. A series of short prose fragments told from several viewpoints, FAR ENOUGH follows Willie Benson, Wade Newman, and young Jackie Newman as they crisscross the high plains of eastern Montana, each searching for something to hold onto. Wilkins's narratives-splintered, wending, intertwined-sprawl out beneath a huge, dazzling sky filled with "blue lightning run the wrong way, red eruptions and the slow fade to gold, a white ache along the horizon." Poetic, darkly humorous, subversive-FAR ENOUGH is a Western for our time.

Author Biography

Joe Wilkins is the author of the novels The Entire Sky and Fall Back Down When I Die, both of which garnered wide critical acclaim. His memoir, The Mountain and the Fathers, won the GLCA New Writers Award, and his four previous collections of poetry include Thieve and When We Were Birds, winner of the Oregon Book Award. Born and raised on a sheep and hay ranch in eastern Montana, Wilkins lives with his family in the foothills of the Coast Range of Oregon, where he directs the creative writing program at Linfield University.