Synopses & Reviews
The Utah Canyons WildMall gives tourists exactly what they want. An archivist preserves a rare map of a vanished Lake Tahoe. The Grand Canyon can only be visited in replica form. These storieslyrical, deadpan, surrealblur the line between the natural world and the world we make.
Praise for Recapture:
A Library Journal Best Short Story Collection of the Year
Unsentimental stories that tell us what the American West looks like now and what weve lost; the Grand Canyon, for instance, can be seen only in replica after environmental catastrophe.”
Barbara Hoffert, Library Journal
"Recapture is a living, breathing museum of natural wonders. With writing as spare as the landscape she evokes, Olsen wades through the detritus of the human experience and finds clarity there, and some magic, too."
ZYZZYVA
"True to its name, Recapture grasps after lost loves, fading histories, and shifting landscapes to bring us an expertly curated series of human exhibits in an expansive, outdoor museum."
Lindsey Griffin, the museum of americana literary review
"Erica Olsen gives us the dream life of the Southwest in this striking collection, a landscape told in language as spare and pungent and exacting as the desert itself. A swift and lovely debut from a writer of real gifts."
Kevin Canty, author of Where the Money Went
"These sly, heartbreaking stories capture the modern West, where the past is ever-present and the future is already here."
Alison Baker, author of How I Came West, and Why I Stayed
"Beneath their polished surfaces, Erica Olsens stories are subversive, sometimes darkly funny, and always disquieting. When you set off on a hike in her universe, be prepared for surprises. You may find yourself exploring Utahor Norwayor a surreal faux wilderness where rainbows are regularly scheduled and gnats are outlawed. Also, prepare to be exhilarated. This accomplished writer really knows her way through the tricky zone between truth and falsehood where art is made."
Susan Lowell Humphreys, author of Ganado Red
"A sharp, wise new voice from the American West, Erica Olsen is the real thing. As wild as David Foster Wallace or George Saunders and as tender as James Salter or Alice Munro, Olsens stories are hilarious, painful, and achingly lovely."
Amanda Eyre Ward, author of Close Your Eyes
"Like all good narratives, Erica Olsens Grand Canyon II” suggests great consequence. The past is another country. The task of memory is impossible. No one exists and nothing ever happened. But somewhere in your brain, a beautiful lie is being spun..."
Sarah Manguso, author of The Guardians
"Recapture is like a lost map of the backcountry, detailing the forgotten places where secrets shove up through the dust, pieces of lives demanding to be made whole. The territory is endlessly illuminating and constantly surprising, revealing a master storyteller at work."
Kim Todd, author of Tinkering with Eden: A Natural History of Exotic Species in America
Synopsis
Haruki Murakami and Annie Proulx converge in contemporary stories of love and longing set in dreamlike landscapes of the Southwest.
Synopsis
A Library Journal Best Short Story Collection of the Year
"Unsentimental stories that tell us what the American West looks like now and what we've lost --LIBRARY JOURNAL
The Utah Canyons WildMall gives tourists exactly what they want. An archivist preserves a rare map of a vanished Lake Tahoe. The Grand Canyon can only be visited in replica form. These stories--lyrical, deadpan, surreal--blur the line between the natural world and the world we make.
ERICA OLSEN lives in the Four Corners area, where she does archives and curation work for archaeology museums. A graduate of Stanford, Harvard, and the University of Montana MFA program, she has also been a Djerassi Fiction Fellow at the University of Wisconsin. Her short fiction has appeared in ZYZZYVA, High Desert Journal, and other publications, and her nonfiction pieces in magazines including Fine Books & Collections and High Country News. Her work has received awards including the 2011 Barthelme Prize for Short Prose (for "Grand Canyon II," included in Recapture).
Synopsis
"
Recapture is a living, breathing museum of natural wonders..."
--ZYZZYVA
In the stories of Recapture, a curator preserves silences in glass jars, a woman works in a larger-than-life-size replica of the Grand Canyon, a hug from a King Kong costume-clad unknown sparks an epiphany on the Empire State Building, and a bookmobile trundles through the deserts of southeastern Utah, its innards full of Jane Austen novels. Archaeology and history, love and loneliness, identity and preservation all wind through the collection, blurring the lines between the natural world and the world we create.
Synopsis
The Utah Canyons WildMall gives tourists exactly what they want. An archivist preserves a rare map of a vanished Lake Tahoe. The Grand Canyon can only be visited in replica form. These stories—lyrical, deadpan, surreal—blur the line between the natural world and the world we make.
Synopsis
The stories in Recapture take us to an American West that is both strange and familiar. The Grand Canyon can only be visited in replica form. An archivist preserves a rare map of a vanished Lake Tahoe. A Utah cliff dwelling survives as an aging roadside attraction in California. By turns lyrical, deadpan, and surreal, Erica Olsens stories bring us the natural world and the world we make, the artifacts we keep and the memories and desires that shape our lives.
About the Author
Erica Olsen lives in Dolores, Colorado near the Four Corners area, where she does archives and curation work for archaeology museums. Her stories and essays have appeared in
ZYZZYVA, High Country News, High Desert Journal, and other magazines. A graduate of Stanford, Harvard, and the University of Montana MFA program, she has also been a Djerassi Fiction Fellow at the University of Wisconsin.
Table of Contents
Contents
Grand Canyon II 5
Adventure Highway 8
Everything Is Red 21
Driveaway 31
Reverse Archaeology 48
The Discovery of Cliff Palace, Mesa Verde National Park 58
The Keepers 60
Bristlecone 64
The Curation of Silence 70
Going to Randsburg 88
Utah WildMall Rangers 103
Wonders of the World 110
Persuasion 119
A Dish of Stinging Nettles 129
Everywhen 134
Recapture 140
Acknowledgments 172