Pam Houston attained critical and popular success with the 1992 publication of her first short-story collection, Cowboys Are My Weakness. The volume garnered its author not only impressive sales and reviews but also media attention in the form of magazine profiles, interviews, and several talk-show appearances, suggesting that her stories of adventurous women rafting through white-water rapids, guiding Dall sheep hunters in Alaska, and attempting to establish relationships with men of the American West tapped a little-explored but ripe territory in contemporary consciousness. Cowboys Are My Weakness was named a New York Times Notable Book in 1992, won the 1993 Western States Book Award, and was later translated into at least nine languages. A review in The New York Times (15 July 1992) stated, "Her collection of short stories is an odyssey of a young woman who develops a habit of bad love and uses adventure both to recover and carve a place...