Western Electric

Winner of the Iowa Short Fiction Award

All eight of Don Zancanella’s wry, pristinely written stories have memorable settings in the historical or contemporary American West, ranging from love among abandoned missile silos to a tale of Laotian refugees in Wyoming to an account of a traveling chimpanzee show. Collectively they form a kind of alternative history of this too-often-stereotyped region.

Praise for Western Electric

“Storytelling from the wide wilderness of the hinterlands . . . There’s current here, hot and dangerous and vital.”
–Lee K. Abbott, author of All Things, All at Once and Wet Places at Noon.

“Compelling, witty, and highly amusing . . . a wonderful naturalness of voice that is also precise and lyric . . . accomplished, wise, and entertaining.”
–Oscar Hijuelos, Pulitzer Prize winner and author of The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love.

“Clever and subtle . . . exceptionally cohesive.”
—Publishers Weekly

“Drawn with remarkable perception and control.”
—New York Times