Life Is A Country Western Song

A short story collection by H. Lee Barnes

WINNER of the New Mexico – Arizona Book Award in Fiction!!!

Author of Talk to Me, James Dean and Cold Deck, H. Lee Barnes is an eloquent ambassador for the contemporary American West. In these twelve moving stories, Barnes delves deep into the wild, expansive places of the region and of the human heart that are slowly coming to rein. With gorgeously distilled prose, Barnes writes of vastness and distance, of the separate, small inches and whole histories that occupy equal measures of the western spirit. Each of the stories in Life Is a Country Western Song reveals a character longing to close a gap, or who, for better and for worse, have come to terms with their estrangement and exile. A divorcee rekindles a doomed romance over the internet; a locksmith absorbs broken dreams in foreclosed homes; a boy learns how to love and hate in Juarez, Mexico; because he has no one else, a Nevada Patrolman confides his marital troubles in a dog. Wrought with empathy, precision and a steady finger on the pulse of the complexities facing today’s changing, often turbulent West, Barnes’s stories show a writer at the apex of his craft, offering an updated take on a West that is rapidly descending into the annals of legend.

Life Is a Country Western Song featured on Vietnam Veterans of America’s Arts of War

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

H. Lee Barnes, memoirist, novelist and short story writer, is the author of ten books. His short works have received the Willamette Fiction Award and the Arizona Authors Assn. fiction prize. He was inducted in 2009 into the Nevada Writers Hall of Fame and in 2013 received an excellence in the arts award from the Vietnam Veterans of America for his body of work. His varied carriers include his working as a deputy sheriff, a private investigator, a narcotics agent, a casino dealer and a college professor. He now lives in the Hualapai Valley in Northern Arizona.

Advance Praise

“Barnes places within the landscape of the West all the unkind and unlovely wonders of the human heart, as all their rusted chambers and unoiled locks are given the chance to shrink or expand under the open skies of  love and memory.”

“Barnes captures colors and textures, wind and silence. And rather than exploiting the West, Barnes’ characters live through its dust, leaving readers without leftovers or anything to ignore. These stories find beauty in survival.”

“The qualities that make Lee Barnes one of Nevada’s literary treasures are on ample display in these stories: the lived-in authenticity of his characters; a knack for the evocatively described setting; his precisely deployed empathy; and prose as supple, durable, and well-made as your favorite saddle. As a storyteller, he never shows off and always delivers. Life Is a Country Western Song is a genuine treat.”

“Lee Barnes—as always—writes from the bone, sinew, blood and beating heart of the lives of ‘ordinary’ people. In that, the reader is brought to understand that those who some see as ‘ordinary,’ are, in fact, extraordinary; are moving through betrayals, injuries, illness and isolation with pure grace. Readers, meet your neighbors and yourself.”

Book Details

Title: Life Is A Country Western Song

Author: H. Lee Barnes

Publication Date: February 12, 2019

ISBN: 978-1-936097-20-3

$16.95

Dist. by Publishers Group West (an Ingram Brand)
www.pgw.com

Available at your favorite local bookstore, on Indiebound.com, or from Baobab Press affiliate  Sundance Books and Music

Scheduled Readings

  • April 25, 2019 – College of Southern Nevada
  • Sept. 5, 2019 – Changing Hands Bookstore – 6428 South McClintock Drive – Tempe, AZ
  • Sept. 21, 2019 – Peregrine Book Co. – 219A North Cortez – Prescott, AZ

Lee in the News