western eye press
BRAVE NEW PUBLISHING FOR A MULTI-MEDIA WORLD
Fiction:
two novels by Jim Davidson
Postmarked Calexico
a novel by Jim Davidson, 274 pages, softbound, $15.95, plus shipping,
This paperback edition is currently available through amazon.com, and as a Kindle eBook from amazon, or an iBook from Apple's iBookstore for $9.95
Postmarked Calexico explores the enigma and disappearance south of the border of one, or maybe more than one, renegade writer who doesn't want to be found. One man's dogged search for an old friend through the mountains of Colorado and the beaches of Baja ultimately entangles him in the labyrinthine lives of two men and a woman who will change him forever. This search, and Davidson's spare and provocative narrative style, peel away layer after layer of silence hiding a complex story of passion and protest, of a pair of committed writers (perhaps over-committed writers) whose quixotic destiny is both to challenge and to flee the destructive matrix of contemporary America. Echoes of Edward Abbey and B. Traven haunt these pages, along with the almost impossible dream of disappearing into a dangerous emptiness called Mexico. Davidson deftly weaves the stubborn heroism of their lives-as-protest—along with their need to live in the shadows—into the bone-dry mythology of the American West.
About Jim Davidson
Jim Davidson grew up in a small mining town on the west slope of the Rockies. As a novelist, he spun engaging stories from his own experiences as a refugee of small-town newspaper wars (the endless survival struggles of small, independent Western papers that he lived through as a publisher, editor, and writer in Colorado and Kansas). Jim's first novel, Mine Work, won the prestigious Western Writers of America Spur Award. Davidson was a life-long resident of the Colorado mountains until his untimely death from cancer in 2013.
Jim Davidson was as good a friend as he was a novelist—a great spirit!
The Western Eye Press family misses him sorely.
Mine Work
a novel by Jim Davidson, 300 pages, softbound, $15.95 plus shipping
Currently available from amazon.com, and as a Kindle eBook from amazon, or an iBook from Apple's iBookstore, for $9.95
We are thrilled to reissue Jim Davidson's first novel, Mine Work. Originally published to rave reviews in 1999, Mine Work, won all the awards that a western novel can win, and after two sell-out editions, disappeared from sight—victim of the conventional wisdom that pushes publishers to go with the new rather than the lasting. It's a helluva a good read, and with any luck it will never go out of print again.
Reviews were unanimous:
"Mine Work is as fine a novel as has been written about the West's mining past…"
The Salt Lake Tribune, June 18, 2000
"With a tone that is often reminiscent of Hemingway, the author writes a moving tale of not only power and shame but also of redemption...the book is fine reading."
The Denver Post, September, 12 1999
"…flinty and affecting…[Mine Work] explodes...into descriptive sprays of language that evoke not just the West but the West's best writers."
The New York Times Book Review, December 19, 1999
In Mine Work, when Markus Cottin begins digging into some family mysteries his father tells him he will find "only a chain of fools, each one worse than the one that came before." His search takes him to Colorado mining towns, to the Navajo reservation, and around the desert Four Corners region, and the story he uncovers is a painful one of race politics and labor unrest in the 1950s West. After he finds his own family involved in bombings and the murder of a Navajo miner, he can't stop until the story leads him back, link by link to his grandfather, his father, and ultimately himself.
A powerful novel of the Southwest, Mine Work is told with feeling and style by a writer who knows the region, road by dusty road. When first published in 1999, Mine Work won two coveted Spur Awards from the Western Writers of America for best original paperback and best first novel. In multiple printings it quickly became an admired classic of Western writing.
WESTERN EYE PRESS • PO BOX 2 CRESTONE CO 81131