Welcome to the short stories of Ron Carlson, where strange beach towels turn up in your living room; where the ordinary son of a family of geniuses spins a rollicking tale of happiness and disappointment; where a teenaged magician seduces the prettiest girl in his high school and the world, with devestating consequences; and where a desperate ex-con with a broken heart must hide out in a desert hotel, only to make a startling discovery.Long regarded as one of our finest living short story writers, Ron Carlson triumphantly returns to the form with At the Jim Bridger, nine stories that are epic in scope and confessional in tone; stories that enfold the reader in a world of love and mystery, and make us feel better than just about anything written on the page.

In The News of the World, Ron Carlson's celebrated last collection, it was widely noted that the news was good. Here, as everybody goes to Plan B, the news is stronger, edgy, and bittersweet.Here are men and women in the middle—of life, of relationships. There is a difference between what they set out for and what they get. A single mother keeps house on an aircraft carrier. A new father finds himself seduced by a motorcycle. A lonely professor is forced to face a few truths. Braced by honesty and lifted by affection for the world, these stories are a stunning showcase for a writer tackling universal themes in new ways. Get ready: when Plan A breaks down, Ron Carlson is here.

In this tender, comic novel, Larry Boosinger—graduate student, writer, garage attendant, escaped convict (and perhaps a person)—has one foot in late adolescence while he searches frantically for a place to put the other. Beset by illusions, attracted by paradoxes, Larry carries on his allegorical fistfight with life. He operates in a movie-created world where attempts are made at perfection. Enamored of the romantic ideals of old movies, popular songs, and his own personal hero, F. Scott Fitzgerald, he seeks experience that will match his expectations. 

Prepare to be amused, moved, disturbed. These dozen stories by a master of idiosyncrasy visit a world where wit has heft, charm has shadow, and human beings act out all the complicated nuances of love. In the title story a young man waiting in the Hotel Eden discovers, as others have, that Eden is not a permanent domicile. In "Zanduce at Second," a baseball player turned killer-by-accident undergoes a surprising transformation. We root for escaped felon Ray ("A Note on the Type") as he carves his name on a culvert wall. We drive the sweltering summer streets of Phoenix as a nineteen-year-old narrator goes through an unsettling sexual awakening ("Oxygen"). In these and other stories, whether his characters are getting sabotaged by nightcaps or encountering nudists on a rafting trip, Carlson takes us to a generous array of places in a new way. Finally, in "The Chromium Hook," he takes us to a lovers' lane where he solves an ancient mystery.

These stories come at us from every direction. They are Ron Carlson's response to the eighties, the stories we will want by our sides as the decade ends.Whether it is a husband trying to bring his marriage back together or Bigfoot finally coming forward, Carlson's characters speak with radical honesty that is disarming. They are the men and women all around us who open the refrigerator at two in the morning and see the faces of missing children on the milk carton. The world is a large dose sometimes, and they wonder whether they can measure up to its danger and its magic.

From Publishers WeeklyStarred Review. The dense Wind River Mountains of western Wyoming is where Carlson (_Five Skies_) sets his brooding latest, a tale of expired love and desperate measures. Mack, son of a longtime rancher, has made many missteps in life, culminating in a recent stint in jail where he'd rusted like an old post when the weather turned. While he's in jail, his recently ex-wife Vonnie agrees to join him one last time on their annual ritual of backpacking through the Wyoming wilderness to fish, camp and rediscover each other. Mack, though, has a hidden motive: a friend/technical genius has hired him to retrieve a valuable drone that's crash-landed in the forest. Carlson describes the couple's six days wandering the wooded terrain in delicate, measured prose, careful to miss neither the lush scenery nor the incrementally amplified tension as Mack edges closer to his prize and shady characters from the past appear. Carlson has produced a work of masterful fiction, combining the sad inevitability of a doomed relationship with sheer nail-biting suspense. (June) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. Review"The Signal takes us into terrain that's stunning and terrible. In doing so, it becomes both an elegy to a broken marriage and a heart- stopping, suspenseful thriller. It's a difficult journey, but relax: with Ron Carlson, you really are in expert hands."-_New York Times Book Review_ "Carlson never drops an extra word or a false phrase, even as "The Signal" accelerates like an avalanche, suspicion rolling into fear and then roaring down with a conclusion that shakes the ground. If men can't be brought back to fiction by books as fine as this one, it's their own damn fault."-_Washington Post_ "Ron Carlson's new novel is a love story and a wilderness adventure that mounts to a climax of shocking, and satisfying, violence...Carlson paces his tale with craft and care, never hurrying. "The Signal" is about broken innocence and how, for the individual at least, balance might be found again. Carlson's a romantic --- even when he's writing about failings, folly and violence. This novel...has a lingering elegance and power. Lives go wrong, "The Signal" says, but they can be repaired too, if we find our centers and attend to what's around us." -_Los Angeles Times_ "Read Ron Carlson's latest THE SIGNAL and you'll be convinced that the answer to your worries resides in the woods, in getting back to the basics... It's a sweet, tidy little book about a broken rancher. And yet it won't just help you pass the time, it will help you out." -_Esquire_ "Long revered as a master of the short story, Carlson has a talent for describing landscape (both internal and external), and that translates here intact. At fewer than 200 pages, its beach ready, too." -_GQ_

Collin Elder is running away from a “home” for wayward teenagers. Louisa Holz is escaping from her father, a carnival daredevil. Heading west from Arizona, they meet a third member of the novel’s family—Will Clare, elderly and forgetful but full of rich memories.  “If you can read this one without getting a lump in your throat, turn yourself in to the nearest mortuary. Your heart has ceased to function. This book is about the innate hunger of the human heart to belong. To be part of a family unit whether or not there are blood ties. It’s about the refusal of the American adult to be bothered with those young enough or old enough to be a nuisance. And it’s about the most touching book I’ve read in many a moon.” —Carolyn Vaughter, Houston Chronicle            

From a widely admired author, a poignant novel about homecoming, friendship, growing up, and growing old for fans of Richard Ford and Richard Russo In this finely wrought portrait of western American life, Ron Carlson takes us to the small town of Oakpine, Wyoming, and into the lives of four men trying to make peace with who they are in the world. In high school, these men were in a band. One of them, Jimmy, left Oakpine for New York City after the tragic death of his brother. A successful novelist, he has returned thirty years later, in 1999—because he is dying.With Carlson’s characteristic grace, we learn what has become of these friends and the different directions of their lives. Craig and Frank never left; Mason, a top lawyer in Denver, is back in town to fix up and sell his parents’ house. Now that they are reunited, getting the band back together might be the most important thing they can do.Return to Oakpine is a generous, tender look at friendship, family, and the roads not taken, by a writer at the peak of his craft. **