UP WHERE I USED TO LIVE: Stories

by Max Schott

"There is a glamour in these stories of ranchers and farmers, breeding, herding, trading, nursing sick animals, repairing broken gear, fending off the weather. Schott focuses with superb grace and accuracy on precisely those hours and weeks and months of a rancher's life that i the usual mythology occur offstage between lynchings and Indian raids. In the best sense, he is an old-fashioned realist...There is a concreteness, a poetry, an authority and authenticity in these stories of the real Wild West that makes them a pleasure to read." — Robert Kiely, New York Times Book Review

MAX SCHOTT, a former horse trainer and rancher, teaches fiction writing and literature in the college of creative studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Several of the stories in this collection have been anthologized — "The Old Flame" in the Best American Short Stories of 1978, "Early Winter" in the Pushcart Prizes IV (1980), and "The Horsebreaker" in the Norton Anthology of Short Stories. In addition, Schott is the author of Murphy's Romance, a novel that has been made into a Martin Ritt film starring Sally Field and James Garner.

159 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1978