A lean year and other stories

by Robert Laxalt

In this collection of sixteen short stories, Robert Laxalt evokes the Nevada of the 1950s with illuminating insight. Written when Laxalt was in his twenties, the stories are as fresh as if they were penned yesterday. Humanity good and bad, humor and cruelty, satire and adventure are found in these early stories of a Nevada poised on the brink of change. In the lead story, Cowboy Clint Hamilton laments that the town is "getting more like a big city every day" as the traditional gambling joints of earlier times give way to the gaudy casinos that will soon become modern glitz. In another story, set in the remote rangelands of northern Nevada where livestock is king, Old Button can only fantasize about being "the best buckaroo that ever lived.". On a Paiute Indian reservation only sixty miles from Reno, a citified lawyer learns how thin civilization's veneer can be for two Indian youths who revert to primitive ways of killing without a twinge of remorse. Laxalt finds poignancy in the last