Site Fidelity: Stories

by Claire Boyles

Overview

A 2022 Whiting Award Winner in Fiction
Finalist for the 2022 Reading the West Debut Fiction Award
Finalist for the 2022 Colorado Book Award for Literary Fiction
Longlisted for the 2022 PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Short Story Collection

Set in the western sagebrush steppe, Site Fidelity is a vivid, intimate, and deeply human exploration of life on the shifting terrain of our changing planet.

Firmly rooted in the modern American West, Site Fidelity follows women and families who feel the instinctual, inexplicable pull of a home they must work to protect from the effects of economic inequity and climate catastrophe. A seventy-four-year-old nun turns to eco-sabotage to stop a fracking project. A woman delivers her own baby in a Nevada ghost town. A young farmer hides her chicken flock from the government during a bird flu epidemic. An ornithologist returns home to care for her rancher father and gets caught up trying to protect a breeding group of endangered Gunnison sage grouse.

In lean, lyrical prose, Claire Boyles evokes the bleakness and beauty of our threatened western landscapes. Spanning the decades from the 1970s to a plausible near future, this knockout debut introduces unforgettable characters who must confront the challenges of caregiving and loss alongside the very practical impacts of fracking, water rights law, and other agricultural policies. Site Fidelity is a vivid, intimate, and deeply human exploration of life on the shifting terrain of our changing planet.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780393531831
Publisher:	Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.
Publication date:	06/15/2021
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	208
Sales rank:	313,895
File size:	966 KB

About the Author

Claire Boyles is a writer, teacher, and former sustainable farmer. A 2022 Whiting Award winner, she received her MFA in creative writing from Colorado State University. Her fiction has appeared in Virginia Quarterly Review, Kenyon Review, and Boulevard, among others. She lives in Loveland, Colorado.

Editorial Reviews

04/12/2021

Boyles’s debut collection bristles with intelligence and determination as her characters face the harsh realities of the American West, from the 1970s to the near future. In “Ledger,” a rancher’s daughter grapples with her father’s stroke and selling their land, which protects a grouse native to the area. Other stories trace domestic fault lines. In “Alto Cumulus Standing Lenticulars,” a woman reckons with expecting a baby while in an unhappy marriage, and “Early Warning Systems” tracks a marriage’s dissolution. “Sister Agnes Mary in the Spring of 2012” features a nun who takes a stand on fracking, and “Lost Gun, $1,000 Reward. No Questions,” follows two brothers en route to see their dying father. The linked “Flood Stories,” “Natural Resource Management,” and “Best Response to Fear” explore the lives of three sisters and their children, one of whom is a police officer convicted of falsifying evidence to incriminate people, including his best friend. At their best, the stories of women dealing with messes men left behind evoke the characters’ grit and hope as well as a sense of place, colored in by their concern for the environment. Fans of Annie Proulx and John Sayles will love this. (June)

Publishers Weekly

"Shot through with a nicely fatalist sense of humor, the stories press on the touchy question of just who best speaks for today’s American West—those who, in the pioneer tradition, view it as a realm of independence and opportunity or those who feel called upon to preserve it."

Wall Street Journal - Sam Sacks

"Site Fidelity is a masterful collection of stories set in the contemporary and complex West…Site fidelity, the tendency to return to a previously occupied location, seems rather fitting—because of its artistry and heft, this is a book I will return to again and again."

Laura Pritchett

"These are tenderly, insightfully-told tales of the hardscrabble lives of women in the present-day West, their families and how nature influences those ties."

Albuquerque Journal - David Steinberg

"Tracing a landscape of deserts, mountains, sagebrush, and ranches, this story collection evokes life in the contemporary American West. Boyles’s characters are steeped in a sense of connection to place and aware of the precariousness of their environment."

The New Yorker

"[Site Fidelity] offers a sometimes bleak, often funny and warm look at family and sense of place in the West... [It explores] how people form an ethos of climate justice and care for their communities and natural resources. Boyles often brings a sense of humor to this work, showing how that ethos can manifest itself alongside all the quirks and inconsistencies of the human brain."

Outside - Erin Berger

"Claire Boyles grabs the myth of the American West and reinvents it…Each of her harrowing stories introduces us to a remote landscape where the world has begun to crumble—sometimes literally—and yet the beauty of these places comes through, the hope of the people who live there comes through, due to Boyle’s patient, observant eye. A compassionate, raw, unforgettable collection."

Leigh Newman

"Site Fidelity pulled me in from the first line and stayed with me long after I’d finished the last. This is one of those rare story collections that manages to be both unsparing and bighearted, brutal and beautiful, intimate and sweeping. Claire Boyles is a marvel, and this book is a triumph."

Molly Antopol

"[These 10 stories] offer an unrelenting clarity... This is the real stuff, adulthood at its most complex... Boyles weaves such knowledge deep into her narratives, choosing to end many of them in the middle, in the moment just before the trouble starts. It is a deft and daring choice."

Los Angeles Times - David L. Ulin

"[Boyles's] settings exist as characters in their own right, carefully detailed, possessed of complex backstories, and imbued with definite, sometimes dangerous, agency... Site Fidelity bursts with pleasures—not just its lush attention to place but its frequent moments of humor...as well as the delightful frissons of surprise that shiver off the pages each time we catch a reference to a previous story."

Kenyon Review - Amy Hassinger

"If we are to survive, even the next several decades, we need to feminize the myth of the American West…Claire Boyle’s stories do just that, the tenacious, unsinkable women who inhabit them no longer content to sit back and let powerful men of industry make us all extinct. For anyone who loves and grieves the West, who isn’t afraid to open their eyes and see her distress, these beautifully forged stories are as essential as water."

Pam Houston

"Attuned to harsh, western beauty and full of unforgettable, resilient characters, Site Fidelity is a bold and deeply affecting debut collection. Boyles writes with grace, style, and tremendous compassion about family, activism, and the undeniable impact (for better or worse) human beings have on the planet."

Kimberly King Parsons

"Site Fidelity is an impressive collection of stories that exudes kindness and warmth for its characters and a clear passion for its central thesis… [A] solid debut collection by a writer to watch out for."

Chicago Review of Books - Taylor Griggs

"In Site Fidelity, Claire Boyles explores her characters’ love for the land with as much care as she evokes the knotty loyalties within families. These masterful short stories are wise, graceful, and as unsparingly beautiful as the sagebrush-scented landscapes they explore."

Kirstin Valdez Quade

2021-03-31

Moments of reckoning both personal and environmental are centered in this debut collection of lightly linked stories set in the American West.

A trio of sisters are central characters in a number of stories: There's Ruth, a pregnant mother who gets a job in a Nevada ghost town to earn enough money to take her children back to her home in Colorado (“Alto Cumulus Standing Lenticulars”); Mano, who realizes a construction company is regularly poisoning the fish in the local river and that her city department plans to cover up the spills (“Early Warning Systems”); and Sister Agnes Mary, who is compelled into action when a new priest agrees to let drilling take place near their parochial school’s playground (“Sister Agnes Mary in the Spring of 2012”). In "Ledgers," an ornithologist-turned-caretaker forced to sell the family ranch to pay for her father’s medical bills grapples with the new owner’s callousness toward the endangered Gunnison sage grouse that returns to the land yearly to nest. Such loyalty to an area is called “site fidelity,” a concept that gives this collection its name and throughline: What does it mean for our survival and well-being to be deeply interwoven with the fate of a place and to be aware of its unsustainable trajectory? And what actions are we willing to take when other people don't feel the same sense of urgency and connection? Set against a larger backdrop of energy debates, environmental disasters, and climate change, Boyles’ stories are skillfully layered explorations of the politics and power plays within families, workplaces, and communities. Yet this collection’s true mastery is in the rich and varied voices of the characters and in the small moments in which they reach for hope despite all that has crumbled around them.

Deliberate and compelling.

Kirkus Reviews