NEW WRITERS OF THE PURPLE SAGE ...

NEW WRITERS OF THE PURPLE SAGE edited by Russell Martin (Penguin: $12; 381 pp., paperback original). In the introduction to this anthology of fiction and nonfiction, Martin states he wanted to demonstrate that “western stories aren’t always set in bleak trailer courts, or in dark bars thick with smoke and macho pretensions, or in automobiles involved in desperate sorts of getaways out on lonesome highways.” In an excerpt from “Enduring Seeds,” Gary Nabhan recounts his quest to rediscover the plants Native Americans cultivated: ancestral varieties of corn, squash and beans that contain valuable genetic information. Gretel Ehrlich’s powerful fiction evokes the big-sky country of Montana and the way those empty vistas mark its inhabitants; Russell Martin contrasts the freedom an astronaut experienced in space with his increasingly restricted life in Colorado in “Beautiful Islands.”