By Anita Cortez
June 15, 2022
978-1-952085-19-2
266 │ 6x9 │ $18.95
Trade Paperback
Game, Guns, and American Infatuation chronicles one woman’s hunt for identity as an American woman raised in northern Wyoming at the foot of the Bighorn mountains where hunting is part of the cultural heritage, and the harsh realities of the landscape make the badlands both literal and figurative. Her journey takes her from Wyoming to Guam to Kansas, but what she discovers is that her terroir remains: We can search for peace or equity. We can hunt for mutual understanding. We can call it whatever we like, but we are all bound by the rules of the game: We must wander this earth as the animals we are, caught in the helix we call our lives.
Game, Guns, and American Infatuation
Anita Cortez grew up in northern Wyoming. She traveled extensively with her family which broadened her perspective beyond the badlands of Wyoming. She received her Bachelor of Arts in Creative Writing from Kansas State University and her Master of Arts in Creative Writing from the University of Wyoming where she had the opportunity to study with writer John Edgar Wideman. Her work focused on poetry. She made a career out of creativity working at Kansas State University to open doors for others. She was the first director of Undergraduate Research and Creative Inquiry at K-State and was honored as a Distinguished Woman of K-State. She lives in Manhattan, KS.
Cortez offers the reader a metaphorically driven portrait of what it’s like to live both inside and outside the conservative, male-oriented culture of the hunter. Despite the challenges of a life experienced as both predator and prey, the emotion most prominent in Cortez’s stories is reverence. For home. Family. Heritage. Community. For life itself.
—Steve Heller, author of The Automotive History of Lucky Kellerman
Don't read Anita Cortez' Game, Guns and American Infatuation if you are unwilling to find eloquence, elegance and emotion in an experience that includes hunting, chicken-plucking and other realties of a genuine American experience. Don't read her essays if you don't believe prose can be as gorgeous and precise as a poetic elegy—or an orchestral one, for that matter. Don't pick this book up if you aren't prepared for anecdotes that make you laugh and cry simultaneously and a narrative that arcs like a rainbow. If you do pick it up, don't expect to put it down unchanged.
—David H. Bradley, author of the novels South Street and The Chaneysville Incident.
