The Tonopah Review: A Quarterly Journal of Prose and Poetry
...on my shelf
I have been stuck in preternaturally clement California all fall, so imagine my delight at reading The Short Short Hitchhiker, by Stanley Gurcze, edited by Richard Menzies. Desert! Roadsides! Blazing sun! Rainstorms! Boulevards! Highways and byways and frontage roads and county line roads and plenty of sandy shoulders. While Gurcze’s topographical path might meander based on the availability of rides, his prose never does. Gurcze’s descriptions of the folks he meets on down the road are pitch perfect. And I haven’t even mentioned the title reference: the well-traveled roadside narrator, while possessing a keen eye for detail, description, and detecting dubious drivers, is missing one of the more necessary components for trekking. That is, Stanley has no feet.
And for anyone curious about the editor, Richard Menzies, an important critical narrator of the Great Basin and roadside Nevada, find his blog here.
A big thanks to the Virginia Avenue Press, who have again taken the pulse of the American West, and produced a narrative that is at once relevant and compelling. Read more here. And be sure to check out the next reading on Thursday, November 17th, at Sundance Books and Music in Reno, from 6:30 to 8:00pm.
Bravo, folks. And see you on down the road.
Copyright notice: Tonopah Review, ISSN 1947-5527 content within this site is copyrighted to the writers to whom the work is attributed, or to the tonopah review literary journal.
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