Short Stories of the San Juans

This collection of 11 short stories set in the San Juan Mountains of Colorado is little known but well worth the readers time. There are no real heroes in the book, just a variety of men and women who are forced to deal with dilemmas we all face in our everyday life. The settings for the stories are in mountain mining towns such as Telluride, Ouray, Montrose, Gunnison, Cortez, Dolores and Norwood, Colorado. The stories are intense, frightening, honest and some come Oh so close to home. Let's look at one of them. In Toward the Sun, you have a woman dealing with the probability that the man she loves, and who loves her in his own way, is slipping away. The following description of his honesty is an example of the wonderful writing in the book. "But he cannot be dishonest. If there were a seed of dishonesty in him, he would, like an oyster, make a pearl of it. That kind of honesty is both hard to come by and hard to endure." The age old desire to change someone to fit your expectations and the possible results and cost of such change, are fit into a marvelous story which will leave you with a wider perspective of life and the choices we make. Is honesty really the best policy? Is happiness worth any cost? Nelson explores the age old dilemma of someone that has a job but no options or alternatives and tries to deal with desires and longings, as follows: "Maybe he liked the dog for his hunger: The dog had done something-he'd escaped, hidden, lived free. Marshall envied that. He had hunger too, but for what? He didn't know for what. Maybe he had hunger for hunger. He wanted to do something. Something: that didn't say much. Do what? Something besides work." This is the first book I have read by Nelson but it will not be the last. Fortunately, he has written three other novels, two collections of short stories and a host of short stories in literary magazines. He also has won a PEN fiction award and the Edward Abbey Prize for Ecofiction. This is an above average book by an above average author.