2 Chill-Out Books to Read Over July 4 (and More)

In 1934, Cole Porter, adapting a Montana poet/engineer’s lyrics, crafted “Don’t Fence Me In.” Thomas McGuane’s dazzling new collection. Crow Fair, invokes the grit and determination of Westerners who assert their right to "let me be by myself in the evening breeze/Listen to the murmur of the cottonwood trees."

 McGuane’s scrupulous prose and majestic Big Sky setting thread together these 17 stories, highlighting a cast of characters who struggle to face down misfortune. A former prostitute schemes her way to respectability by marrying a closeted gay man. A troubled grandson takes his blind authoritarian grandmothers on a riverside picnic only to discover a corpse floating downstream.

Now in his 70s, McGuan here continues to burnish his reputation with some of his most accomplished fiction to date.