Emily St. John Mandel
THE LOLA QUARTET
Disgraced and fired from his newspaper job, a young man returns to the Florida town of his birth to begin searching for a daughter he has only recently learned may exist and who could be at considerable risk.
Colin Dickey
AFTERLIVES OF THE SAINTS: STORIES FROM THE ENDS OF FAITH
Saints who murder, saints who gouge out their own eyes and hold them out for inspection, saints who minister to the petty and the bizarre and the maligned.
William J. Cobb
THE BIRD SAVIORS
Set in the stark landscape of the desert southwest in some very near future, a young unwed mother must find her way in a world damaged by a ravaging bird flu epidemic and drought.
Janyce Stefan-Cole
HOLLYWOOD BOULEVARD
A beautiful and famous voyeur in an aging Hollywood hotel discovers she, too, is being watched.
Timothy Schaffert
THE COFFINS OF LITTLE HOPE
The Coffins of Little Hope tells a feisty, energetic story of characters caught in the intricately woven webs of myth, legend and deception.
Jane Bradley
YOU BELIEVERS
When a young woman goes missing, a professional searcher with uncanny empathetic skill works heroically to find her.
Kevin Desinger
THE DESCENT OF MAN
A quiet man living a domestic life with a wife he loves decides to turn the tables one night on two car thieves and, as a consequence, his life spirals into a nightmare.
Joyce Hinnefeld
STRANGER HERE BELOW
Three generations of women struggle to keep faith with each other through more than a half century of radical changes.
Unbridled Among Best Books of 2011
Again in 2011, as in years previous, Unbridled’s books have ranked among the top books for the year as chosen by readers and booksellers alike.
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Listen to Colin Dickey, author of “Cranioklepty - Grave Robbing and the Search for Genius” talks on “The Current” radio show.
William J. Cobb
“What’s So Good About Dust?”
So my forthcoming novel, The Bird Saviors—forthcoming in May/June—opens with a dust storm in southern Colorado, and this is proving to be a prophetic scene. When I began writing the novel some five years ago, I imagined it set in a fuzzy “near future” time, when climate change had caused enough drought to cause dust storms similar to the ones of the great Dust Bowl years of the 1930s. Unfortunately, this imagined reality is now coming true. Besides the wicked dust storms of Phoenix that occurred this summer, we’re now seeing dust storms in Texas. Several news agencies have carried quotes from one person or another, claiming how similar these dust storms are to the “black dusters” of the 1930s. This is a quote from the MSNBC article:
“No injuries were reported from the dust cloud reminiscent of those shown in Dust Bowl photos from the late 1930s. The dust cloud was yet another byproduct of the persistent drought in West Texas, Ziebell said. The U.S. Drought Monitor map released Oct. 11 showed much of Texas, including the South Plains, were still experiencing “exceptional drought” — the most severe category. In an Oct. 6 statement, the National Weather Service in Lubbock reported that there was a “high likelihood” that 2011 could be the driest on record across the South Plains.”
You can read the entire article here, which also includes a (shaky) video: Click Here
Youtube also has more videos, though I saw this one on London’s Daily Mail, which has some funny voiceover from the people shooting the video, including the line spoken by a child, I think: “What’s so good about dust?” Click Here
The catastrophic drought that’s occurring in Texas and the entire Southwest right now is probably a harbinger of things to come. I hope not, but the climate science says that these ultra-dry/hot conditions will become even more likely as the planet heats up. I live part of the time in Custer County, Colorado, and we’re at the edge of the drought zone: This year was bad, but not as bad as, say, Lubbock, Texas. I see fiction and literature as being inextricably linked with the past and future of our landscape and culture, and the vulnerability—and the greatness—of the middle of our country is at the heart of my writing.—William J. Cobb