. . . well written, sweet, yet unsentimental, telling the shared history of a community that’s vanishing.
BOB MINZESHEIMER, USA TODAY
A crisp elegy to an almost-vanished American West.
MEGAN HARLAN, ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY
crystalline… Mountain City, part elegy, part defiance of the elegiac, is the winter view from northern Nevada.
RICHARD EDER, THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW
In the rural West, we’re sometimes lucky, and get the good books we deserve. Old Jules, Housekeeping, The Meadow, and now Mountain City. Northern Elko County is its own nation, and this is its sweet, ironic anthem.
WILLIAM KITTREDGE
Mountain City is at the crossroads of the Western heart—the specific old loved place amid life’s inexorable routes to elsewhere. With a jeweler’s eye and a descendant’s respectful affection, Gregory Martin has caught the cadences of life and lingo in this little Nevada spot that still counts for so much in the American story.
IVAN DOIG
A New York Times Notable Book of the Year
Publisher’s Weekly Starred Review
Library Journal Starred Review
Booklist Starred Review
In the winter of 2014, David Kerr, an undergraduate student taking a Basque Studies class at the University of Nevada, Reno, drove ten hours round trip with a few friends to make a pilgrimage to Mountain City. He sent me these photos below.
In prose as clear as dry air… Martin’s spare elegant writing lovingly documents the people that both created and lived in a lost age of mining and ranching and backbreaking work. His photographic realism gives readers a gift of deeper understanding.
WENDY SMITH, THE SAN DIEGO UNION TRIBUNE
Martin’s is a melancholy song, lovely and heartfelt.
PETER LEWIS, SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE
Life in a dying Western small town has found its worthy chronicler… A poetic, tender look at Mountain City, Nevada (population 33), and its denizens… Martin deftly illuminates the soul and characters behind the crumbling facades.
JOHN MARSHALL, SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER
Martin is a natural storyteller with a gift for using a few words to say a lot… one of those special memoirs that brings universality to ordinary lives.
BOOKLIST, STARRED REVIEW
In prose as clean and full of light as the Western sky, Mountain City presents a way of life once common in America, now fading like a sunset. This book simmers with insight and wisdom about family—and a few good jokes too.
CHRIST OFFUTT, AUTHOR OF OUT OF THE WOODS
Mountain City may seem like a ghostly speck on a map, but for Martin it is the quickened heart of the universe… Gorgeously written, meticulously observed… keen and witty… Martin captures the local characters with humor and nuance, never averting his eyes from the small flaws that make this community real.
PUBLISHER’S WEEKLY, STARRED REVIEW
Martin weaves the history of this boomtown with its dwindling present, tells an intelligent and compelling story within a story, and describes the relationships between the people of Mountain City with precision and care… Highly recommended.
LIBRARY JOURNAL, STARRED REVIEW
Gregory Martin 