A WESTERN HARVEST: The Gatherings of an...

A WESTERN HARVEST: The Gatherings of an Editor, selected and introduced by Frances Ring (John Daniels: $9.95, illustrated). As the editor of Westways, Frances Ring knew some of the most interesting writers working in the West during the ‘70s, including Anais Nin, Wallace Stegner, Norman Corwin and William Saroyan. She combines fond recollections of their collaborations with a collection of essays and memoirs. Jack Smith visits the expatriate Korean community shortly after its establishment in Los Angeles and predicts its future significance. In “Thoughts in a Dry Land,” Stegner writes about the “process westernization of perceptions that has to happen before the West is beautiful to us. You have to get over the color green; you have to quit associating beauty with gardens and lawns; you have to get used to an inhuman scale; you have to understand geological time.” Davis Dutton and Larry L. Meyer close the anthology with a fictional exchange of letters between Junipero Serra and Thomas Jefferson, describing Los Angeles’ future as “the entertainment pueblo of the world.”