In this award-winning collection of linked short stories, Laura Pritchett balances gritty material with genuine warmth and understanding of character. Hell's Bottom is more than a ranch. Home to Renny, one of those women who prefers "a little Hell swirled with their Heaven", and her husband, Ben, who's "gotten used to smoothing over Renny's excesses", the ranch has been the site of births and deaths of both cattle and children, as well as moments of amazing harmony and clear vision.

A day of haying turns violent in "A New Name Each Day", while in "Rattlesnake Fire", Ben and his estranged sister must decide whether to put aside their differences to save families trapped by a forest fire. In Pritchett's masterful hands, the western landscape becomes a zone of familial crisis and, sometimes, transcendence.

A young woman who offers to raise her teenage sister's baby gets more than she bargained for in "a moving story about love, duty, and family" (Publishers Weekly). A supermarket clerk in a small dusty Colorado town, twenty-two-year-old Libby is full of dreams but lacks the means to pursue them. When her younger sister Tess becomes pregnant, Libby convinces her not to have an abortion by promising to raise the child herself. But then Tess takes off after the baby is born and Libby finds that her new role puts her dreams that much further away. Her already haphazard life becomes ever more chaotic. The baby's father, a Christian rodeo rider, suddenly demands custody. Libby loses her job, her boyfriend abandons her, and her own mother harps on how stupid she was to make that promise to Tess. Worse, her sister's reckless new life could put Libby herself in danger. Not just a story of a single mother overcoming obstacles, Sky Bridge is a complex novel from a PEN Award winner that leaves readers with a fresh understanding of what it means to inhabit a world in which dreams die, and are sometimes reborn. "In this spare yet haunting portrait of the American West, Pritchett's powerful, poetic voice speaks with clarity, wisdom, and passion about country, family, and one young woman's majestic spirit." -Booklist "A superb writer." -Library Journal

WINNER OF THE 2018 COLORADO BOOK AWARD "Pritchett writes with an evident love for the mountains and the people that call them home." --Westword, One of Ten Great Books by Colorado Authors in 2017 The residents of Blue Moon Mountain form a tight-knit community of those living off the land, stunned by the beauty and isolation all around them. So when, at the onset of winter, the town veterinarian commits a violent act, the repercussions of that tragedy are felt all across the mountainside, upending their lives and causing their paths to twist and collide in unexpected ways. The housecleaner rediscovering her sexual appetite, the farrier who must take in his traumatized niece, the grocer and her daughter, the therapist and the teacher, reaching out to the world in new and surprising ways, and the ragged couple trapped in a cycle of addiction and violence. They will all rise and converge upon the blue hour--the l'heure bleu, a time of desire, lust, honesty--and learn to navigate the often confusing paths of mourning and love. Writing with passion for rural lives and the natural world, Laura Pritchett, who has been called "one of the most accomplished writers of the American West," graces the land of desire in vivid prose, exploring the lengths these characters--some of whom we've met in Pritchett's previous work--will traverse to protect their own.

Ten years ago, Tess Cross left her newborn daughter with her sister and hightailed it out of what she called NoWhere, Colorado. Now she returns to the eastern plains of Colorado, full of raw rage at herself and at the universe, yearning for the life she never lead and the daughter she left behind. As a levantona who has been running drugs and illegal immigrants once they re beyond the US-Mexico border, she s knowingly and even defiantly entered into a harsh and dangerous world. But suddenly her world has become darker than she can bear: The largest wildfire in Colorado history is blazing. Immigrants are dead. She s haunted by the memory of a Mexican woman she couldn t save and a lost Mexican girl she did. Traffickers of both immigrants and drugs are now hunting her down. But most of all, Tess is at the mercy of her own traumatized soul, and the weight of it is cracking her apart. In the act of coming home, Tess must now face her dying mother, her sister, and her daughter, and most importantly, herself. This book broaches timely topics essential in the Westimmigration, rural poverty, wildfireswith suspense and gritty wisdom as well as Pritchett s trademark lyricism and grace. Like Libby, her sister and the central character of Pritchett s novel Sky Bridge, Tess has her own coming-of-age, in a revelatory story of hard-earned transformation and redemption."

Never mind the Ph.D. and middle-class trappings--Laura Pritchett is a Dumpster diver and proud of it. Ever since she was old enough to navigate the contents of a metal bin, she has reveled in the treasures found in other people's cast-offs.

For "Going Green," Pritchett has gathered the work of more than twenty writers to tell their personal stories of Dumpster diving, eating road kill, salvaging plastic from the beach, and forgoing another trip to the mall for the thrill of bargain hunting at yard sales and flea markets. These stories look not just at the many ways people glean but also at the larger, thornier issues dealing with what re-using--or not--says about our culture and priorities.

The essayists speak to the joys of going beyond the norm to save old houses, old dishwater, old cultures, old Popsicle sticks, and old friendships--and turning them into something new. Some write about gleaning as a means of survival, while others see the practice as a rejection of consumerism or as a way of treading lightly on the earth.

Brimming with practical and creative new ways to think about recycling, this collection invites you to dive in and find your own way of going green.

Laura Pritchett is an award-winning author who has quickly become one of the west's defining literary voices. We first met hardscrabble ranchers Renny and Ben Cross in Laura's debut collection, and now in Stars Go Blue, they are estranged, elderly spouses living on opposite ends of their sprawling ranch, faced with the particular decline of a fading farm and Ben's struggle with Alzheimer's disease. He is just on the cusp of dementia, able to recognize he is sick but unable to do anything about it --the notes he leaves in his pockets and around the house to remind him of himself, his family, and his responsibilities are no longer as helpful as they used to be. Watching his estranged wife forced into care-taking and brought to her breaking point, Ben decides to leave his life with whatever dignity and grace remains. As Ben makes his decision, a new horrible truth comes to light: Ray, the abusive husband of their late daughter is being released from prison early. This opens old wounds in Ben, his wife, his surviving daughter, and four grandchildren. Branded with a need for justice, Ben must act before his mind leaves him, and sets off during a brutal snowstorm to confront the man who murdered his daughter. Renny, realizing he is missing, sets off to either stop or witness her husband's act of vengeance. Stars Go Blue is a triumphant novel of the American family, buffered by the workings of a ranch and the music offered by the landscape and animal life upon it.