This is a beautiful coffee table book with photographs by Peter Brown, and minimal text in the form of very short fictional "bits" by Haruf. The subject matter of the photos is the stark landscape of the high plains, with improbable flashes of natural beauty, and gritty reminders of the hard way of life of those who live on them. It's hard to "review" this work. Here are a couple samples from which you may be able to judge for yourself whether it's your kind of thing.

"People from Denver came out here and put cream-colored stucco on an old clapboard house to look nice and believed they would raise buffalo. Believed they could. Called them bison. So they put barbed-wire fences around a pasture and the first good breeze those buffalo took off and they didn't get them stopped till they got about to the correction line eight miles north. O, people will try anything."

"A friend told me once: he went out to an auction of government used cars and while there he got to talking to an old man. He said he couldn't remember what led up to it or led away from it, but at a certain point in their conversation the old man said:
I'm a bachelor, but I got air-conditioning.
Think about that and that's a story. Air-conditioning as compensation for whatever else you don't have in this life." ( )

This "coffee table" volume is a collection of stunning photographs of the American Midwest -- that area west of the Mississippi and east of the Rocky Mountains, sometimes derisively called "flyover country". Many of the photographs are accompanied by vignettes or one-liners written by Kent Haruf.

Many of Brown's photographs show man-made structures that are slowly being eaten up by the powerful natural forces of this vast landscape -- abandoned homesteads, decaying fences, empty commercial buildings cowering under relentless sun and wind. Others seem designed to remind the viewer just how insubstantial human beings are in the scheme of things -- vast, flat horizons, towering cloud formations, a lone tree in the midst of a browning field. And still others -- the character studies of the people who hang on in this landscape, regardless, have the humor and grit reflected in Haruf's short, often enigmatic contributions.

Readers familiar with Haruf's hand-hewn fiction via novels like "Plainsong" and "Eventide" will immediately recognize the voice and the characters here. Although the Haruf material is new, created specifically for this project, much of it feels like it was lifted from one of his stories: "She was an old woman lived her life and died. And there was no one ever said she was pretty let alone beautiful."

You can flip through this book in a couple of hours. But chances are, you'll want to go back again and again. ( )