Fire Road

Anderson's short-story cycle is one of the best I've read in the last 25 years. The first chapters made me sweat when I read them; the prose was so intense and purely written, distilled language that resembles the best single-malt scotch or Sinatra during his middle phase. Anderson's style is mixture of Hemingway, Dubus, and Beckett (if that Irish writer had been from the American West, he'd have written like this).The one aspect about this writing that I particularly savor is that while it is about the loss of love, children, friends, and fathers, and suffering, blown intestines, the stuff of real pain, it is also about living with all that agony one is asked to endure; it is about surviving with grace and dignity. It is about making art. Like the end of Beckett's great trilogy, it is about going on.Although I enjoyed "Fire Road," the story that gives the book its title, I favored other stories more, "Wonder Bread," "Weather," and "Luck." This is a serious work of art by a writer with talent. I can't wait until the his next work of art arrives.