“McConigley’s deft prose takes people who don’t quite fit, who are not supposed to fit, and makes them part of the landscape. . . . McConigley writes about Wyoming with the same mythic nostalgia that many Southern writers write about the South.”
—Los Angeles Review of Books
“In Cowboys and East Indians, Nina McConigley gives us Wyoming precisely the way we expect it—in landscape, sky, and animal life—and in ways we don’t. The inhabitants of this surprising, thrilling, and richly textured short story collection are unpredictable, both in their actions and identities. . . . A work destined to be a classic, like Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio. Its characters—Indians in America, Americans in India, and Indian-Americans in both places—echo Vonnegut’s statement that ‘Out on the edge you see all kinds of things you can’t see from the center.’ It’s electrifying to be out on the edge with this book.”
—Judge’s Citation, 2014 PEN Open Book Award
“You don’t often read a book that shows you the world you think you know in a wholly unexpected light. Nina McConigley, a wonderful young writer, has given us a fresh and wise view of a new world—at turns delightful and sad, but surprising at every turn. I love this work, and I know it begins a fine career. Highly recommended.”
—Luis Alberto Urrea, author of Queen of America and The Devil’s Highway
“In this collection, McConigley understands the ways in which a place can unsteady and also shape us, and the stories reveal such grace and understated power that you know you are in the presence of an incredible new voice in fiction. And, like the best writers, she knows the exact moment to let wildness rush into the story and ruin us. I loved this book, every story a perfect piece of an amazing landscape.”
—Kevin Wilson, author of Nothing to See Here
“In her captivating debut story collection, Casper-raised author Nina McConigley examines with wit and empathy what it means to be ‘the wrong kind of Indians living in Wyoming.’ . . . As in all great fiction, McConigley has delved into the particular and emerged with genuine stories that touch on the universal.”
—High Country News
“Brave and compelling. . . . What is most admirable is how deftly McConigley shows that even those who never feel as if they fit in somehow develop just as strong a connection to the West as anyone else.”
—Billings Gazette
“Beautiful, startling, poignant, Nina McConigley’s stories invite us into a seldom-depicted landscape, peopled by characters we’ll remember a long time, transfixed as they are between worlds, and racked by unnamable desires.”
—Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, author of Oleander Girl
“We need more books like Cowboys and East Indians, which engage our collective humanity through humor and pathos, rather than exploit our most superficial cultural differences. During a time when issues of identity, race and ethnicity can be divisive, McConigley’s stories clear new paths into the human heart.”
—India Currents Magazine
“McConigley is a painter of many landscape. . . . With detail and wit, McConigley portrays the Western world through the eyes of Hindus and Christians, vegetarians and meat eaters.”
—Bustle
“McConigley is both empathetic towards her characters and able to memorably evoke their personalities through quirks of dialogue. It’s a fine debut.”
—Vol. 1 Brooklyn
“Nina McConigley crafts out of the Wyoming landscape a West few readers have known before—a place where, when you don’t look like everyone else, there aren’t many places to hide. And yet anyone who has ever felt a complicated kind of love for home, country, and family will find pleasure and wisdom in these stunning stories.”
—Eleanor Henderson, author of Ten Thousand Saints
“Shove aside Louis L’Amour and Leslie Silko and make room on the shelf for Nina Swamidoss McConigley, who stakes her distinctive claim to the American West in this moving collection of stories that will hold you rapt with their humor and danger and sadness and fresh-eyed take on cultural, familial, geographic identity.”
—Benjamin Percy, author of The Dead Lands
“What I love about this collection of stories is its wit and warmth. McConigley’s characters are ‘the wrong kind of Indians living in Wyoming,’ and their struggles as exoticized and denigrated community members could be, in a less interesting writer’s hands, yet another scolding tract on America’s guilty conscience. Instead, this book celebrates human pluck and humor, a new sensibility for a new time, when everyone is both at home and utt erly alien in the contemporary American west. A terrific read.”
—Antonya Nelson, author of Bound
“In these moving, emotionally complex stories, Nina McConigley gives us a world within a world most people don’t even know exists. That world exists here, vividly so, and this writer’s wise, wry, and savvy narrators deliver it to us in surprisingly rich and varied ways. This is an excellent debut. McConigley is a wonderful writer.”
—Brad Watson, author of Aliens in the Prime of Their Lives
“A vital and unique perspective on the American experience.”
—Htmlgiant.com
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