Battleborn

"Battle Born" is the motto on the Nevada flag, and Claire Vaye Watkins closes the gap between the words, as if the fight and the birth were one event. Her stories walk the dry country of the American West and its history: brothers scraping a creek for gold in the rush years, an old prospector who finds a teenage girl half-dead near his claim, a man who keeps writing letters to the stranger whose belongings he found scattered off a desert highway, girls in Las Vegas on a night that turns.