![]() "The Pink Nectar Café" reminds us that, despite living in a country of great modernity, the Southwest is still untamed, a place where a wrong turn and the lack of a compass can turn a person into skeletal remains within hours. Some of the book's most tender moments are the author's intensely personal exchanges with his dying mother. ![]() The entire work is haunted by the friendly ghost of environmentalist Edward Abbey, whose biography, "Epitaph for a Desert Anarchist," Bishop penned years ago. His characters are also places - a gambling casino, the Grand Canyon, a dying Arizona river, a supernatural café. His stories are studded with characters that are brave, principled, flamboyant. The author's writing is picturesque and emotional - leaden with an intense affection for a region he considers sacred. When Bishop writes about the Southwest it becomes a painted desert, stark and electric, an enchanted, windswept land of shadowy dawns and psychedelic dusks. Nowhere are the mysteries richer, more voluminous or meaningful than in the Southwest, a place where, by Bishop's reckoning, "the land and the imagination are forever merging." Each ends with the mantra, "Let the mystery be!" It's an ode to the richness of a life lived with more questions than answers. renders "The Pink Nectar Café." Part memoir, part history lesson, part expose, it is a magical collection of stories about ancient and modern cultures.Įach story is prefaced with a quotation from the likes of Shakespeare, Sandburg, Frost, Thoreau, Bonaparte, Anais Nin. The American Southwest - a place of the vast and mysterious open spaces, high deserts and carved valleys - is the canvas upon which author James Bishop Jr.
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