Turtle Point Press

Four generations of an extended mixed-race family live with the problems we''ve all heard about, yet thrive amidst hardship, turning the myth of the Old West on its head.Prize-winning story writer Sallie Bingham''s latest group of tales reverse commonly held assumptions about the American West. The Hispanic, Native, and white members of this rough and tumble family pivot around an outrageously funny and fallible rodeo rider known as Cowboy. They live with alcohol and drug addiction, dependency on a fraying welfare system, poverty, violence, and deep-held loyalties. Unlikely learning and unlikely sources of wisdom abound. "During those long winter nights when Dad took off for Sheridan—no liquor allowed on the rez but Sheridan is only about twenty miles west," Fat Annie tells the boy known as Sure Enough some truths about women that will guide him for the rest of his life. Running away on horseback from the imposition of ashes at his Jesuit boarding school, eleven-year-old Jimmy James finds "this little lady priest" in the town park. She makes the cross with ashes on his horse''s head, then turns to him, and he feels the cross "burn into him worse than any brand." A bizarre accident in "How Daddy Lost His Ear" results in an equally bizarre wedding. And one of the many "white ladies" who appear briefly and disappear fast finally gets Cowboy to tell the truth.These men, women, and kids don''t just endure. They thrive in their own peculiar style, turning seemingly tragic outcomes into sources of madcap humor, and nourishing indelible family ties. This is the West as it was and is, a complex web of traditions and surprising, even shocking, ways of finding triumph.

A MOST ANTICIPATED BOOKS PICK FOR (THE REST OF) 2025. —Michael Patrick Brady, Substack“BEAUTIFUL AND NECESSARY . . . EXAMINES MANY OF THE LIES UNDERPINNING OUR NATIONAL MYTHS.” —Jeffrey Condran, Pittsburgh Post-GazetteA Bureau of Indian Affairs agent in a remote Wyoming reservation reckons with the clash of cultures, his own failings, and the attempted destruction of a people. Five teenagers take a joyride through the barren landscape of a small Wyoming reservation. Only four survive. It’s 1958, and the death triggers years of pent-up tensions between the town of Suncreek and the members of the Towuk tribe. The locals barely subsist in a tenuous small-town existence; the Towuk are still mourning the loss of their long-gone way of life. The white residents of Suncreek deeply resent what they see as the Towuk tribe’s windfall—oil deposits that have turned the desolate reservation into something of sudden value. But the tribe struggles with its newfound money, which has brought them a modicum of wealth for which they have been swindled and abused. The town’s sheriff threatens to make an example of the teenage driver, Nelson Antelope. Tim Hubbard of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, a troubled Korean War vet, acts to thwart that effort and protect the boy. Shut out by the tribe, Hubbard finds guidance in the archived reports from an earlier agent named Dorrance. A protégé of Horace Greeley and his Utopianism, Dorrance was recruited to make farmers out of a horse-borne nomadic tribe—and thus force hard boundaries on how and where they could exist. The dual tales of Hubbard and Dorrance chronicle these conflicted stewards and the devastating toll their reluctant mission takes on a culture not their own.Morally complex and fully relevant to today’s issues of freedom and land occupation, Hard Margins is about captive people and their desire to escape their fates, and the captors who desire just as fervently to escape theirs.