In “The Archivist,” a young Reno woman that hates museums maintains a shrine of objects left in her house by a former lover, all the while deciding whether or not to keep his last forgotten artifact, the one swelling inside her belly. Though she grew up in the small desert town of Pahrump in the southern part of the state, many of Watkins’s stories are set up north, in and around Reno, where she attended college and the place casino magnate Bill Harrah predicted decades back wouldn’t ever be touched by Vegas in terms of commercial appeal. But like all things that linger too long under the orange Nevada sun, it cannot last – leading to as memorable a conclusion as I’ve read in short fiction. Hope and possibility invade a brothel outside of Vegas, defying both logic and stereotype in the process. This unblinking exploration of memory and loss also paces the most affecting story of the collection, “The Past Perfect, The Past Continuous, The Simple Past,” originally published in The Paris Review. We drink and watch the sun dissolve into the Sierras, and for a small sparkling moment, we are who we once were.” “Below us glow the blue-orange flames in the lamps along Main Street. “I feel the last three beers resting like silver nuggets in the bottom of my purse,” Watkins writes, her three characters wandering Virginia City’s sprawling cemetery in the hills. Set in a boomtown turned tourist destination, the friendship of three college students mirrors the moribund trajectory of the town itself, resulting in a loss that no amount of longing – or reenacting – can bring back. Take the story “Virginia City,” for example. A writer of great precision and greater restraint, Watkins is a natural storyteller whose material enriches that gift rather than engulfing it. This rich, diverse environment forms the backdrop of Battleborn, an exceptional debut short fiction collection by Claire Vaye Watkins.

The space between Nevada’s two population centers is known as the Great Basin, a land where only the hardiest somethings and someones endure. (Battle Mountain was once dubbed the Armpit of America by The Washington Post, though the author later issued a mea culpa). On the other is Reno, a big town-little city caught halfway between cosmopolitan San Francisco and the mining town of Battle Mountain, both geographically and otherwise.

On one end is Las Vegas, America’s monument to excessive artifice and artificial excess.

Solitude for many hundreds of miles and emptiness for many more. A variety of strange, exotic things call the Nevada desert home.

Battleborn short stories