Host Jennifer Kemp speaks with Anna Keesey about her new novel Little Century, which tells the story of eighteen-year-old Esther Chambers, who, after the death of her mother, heads west in search of her only living relative.
She settles in the lawless town of Century, Oregon and discovers that the town is in the midst of a range war. There’s plenty of land, but somehow it is not enough for the ranchers—it’s cattle against sheep, with water at a premium. In this charged climate, small incidents of violence swiftly escalate, and the bloodshed gets noticed by the railroad planners. Century will die without a railroad, a fate Pick and his men will go to any lengths to prevent.
Little Century maps our country’s cutthroat legacy of dispossession and greed, even as it celebrates the ecstatic visions of what America could become.
Anna Keesey is a graduate of Stanford University and the Iowa Writer’s Workshop. Her work has appeared in a number of journals and anthologies, including Best American Short Stories. She is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowship and has held residencies at MacDowell, Bread Loaf, Yaddo, and Provincetown. Keesey teaches English and creative writing at Linfield College in McMinnville, Oregon.