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Graywolf Press 1986
Friday Night at Silver Star was selected by James Crumley and Robert Wrigley as the winner of the 1985 Montana Arts Council First Book Award and marked Patricia Henley's debut as a fiction writer. The stories are set in the West and filled with characters who came of age in the late sixties and early seventies, people struggling to make some personal sense of the world. Caught in the transition from Old West to New, their subjective histories are rooted in the land, the weather, and the seasons. But given the occasional opportunity, they won't forego the pleasures of city streets.
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The stories in Friday Night at Silver Star were written from 1979 through 1985, although I took a two year hiatus from writing to teach high school in British Columbia. These stories grew out of the life I left behind at Tolstoy Farm, a back-to-the-land community where I lived in the mid-seventies. It was a hard life physically. We hauled water, grew our own food, chopped wood. Emotionally it was a roller-coaster. I loved the Eastern Washington landscape, the light, the smell of wood smoke, but my first marriage broke up there and my memories of the place are forever colored by that.
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From Kirkus
"Henley's collection is lovely and troubling, lyrical and wise. The language is provocative, startling in its clarity. Friday Night at Silver Star is a fine book, and the reader who longs for intelligent, sparkling prose will find it a delight."
"Altogether, Henley is a tight, spare, melancholy writer, unaffected and refreshing to read."
From Western American Literature
"Friday Night at Silver Star is indeed a quiet yet forceful book about people we all know, especially that person within each of us that we struggle to recognize."
From The New York Times
"By the last story in the collection, 'As Luck Would Have It,' Ms. Henley's skill and determination combine to form a memorable portrait of two stubbornly independent people, a cowboy and an earth mother, fighting their way toward a victory of love. In Friday Night at Silver Star, Patricia Henley has staked a claim on our imaginations in a readable and convincing style."
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