Callan Wink's new story collection is Dog Run Moon. A fly-fishing guide on the Yellowstone River, he is the recipient of an NEA Creative Writing Fellowship and a Stegner Fellowship at Stanford University.One of Wink'ss ten best books set in the American West, as shared at Publishers Weekly:
Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthyRead about the other books on the list.
Disparaging Cormac McCarthy seems somewhat fashionable these days amongst urbane MFA and lit-crit intelligentsia but this novel still knocks me over every time I read it. In fact, I have read it at least once a year for the past ten or so and it is still as unrelentingly grim andpowerful as the first time I picked it up. Comparisons to Moby-Dick are common and, I think, justified.
Blood Meridian is one authority's pick for the Great Texas novel; it is among Simon Sebag Montefiore's six favorite books, Richard Kadrey's five books about awful, awful people, Jason Sizemore's top five books that will entertain and drop you into the depths of despair, Robert Allison's top ten novels of desert war, Alexandra Silverman's top fourteen wrathful stories, James Franco's six favorite books, Philipp Meyer's five best books that explain America, Peter Murphy's top ten literary preachers, David Vann's six favorite books, Robert Olmstead's six favorite books, Michael Crummey's top ten literary feuds, Philip Connors's top ten wilderness books, six books that made a difference to Kazuo Ishiguro, Clive Sinclair's top 10 westerns, Maile Meloy's six best books, and David Foster Wallace's five direly underappreciated post-1960 U.S. novels. It appears on the New York Times list of the best American fiction of the last 25 years and among the top ten works of literature according to Stephen King.
--Marshal Zeringue
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