David Guterson won the 1995 PEN/Faulkner Award and the Pacific Northwest Bookseller Association Award for his novel “Snow Falling on Cedars.” Book 301 is a collection of ten short stories.

As with “Snow Falling on Cedars” the setting of most of these short stories is the Pacific Northwest, which is his home turf. Some of them deal with sports, hiking, hunting, and fishing – the outdoor life that plays a large part in the lifestyle activities of the story’s main characters, mostly male, but with family relationships often having a major influence on what happens. As with most good fiction, the stories are about either problems or interesting things that happen to his characters and how they cope or deal with them.

David Guterson’s smooth-flowing prose allows you to form thorough images of his characters – an ability that is seldom achieved in short stories, and rarely with as much skill as Guterson has. A good example is the shortest story (only 6 pages) with the longest title – “Wood Grouse on a High Promontory Overlooking Canada” – involving a boy and his older brother, a Vietnam veteran. With dim prospects for fishing, they decided instead on a long hike to get the great view that the promontory offered. After unintentionally killing a grouse, the young boy finally got up the nerve to ask his brother the question he had long wanted to ask: “Did you kill anyone in Vietnam?” The way that his brother answered created a closer bond between them. The most amusing story – “Piranhas” – has a boy buying a few tropical fish with his allowance each week, until he ultimately decided to add piranhas, teaching him a very important lesson. I thought that a majority of the stories were quite good, so I recommend this short story collection, especially if you enjoy the outdoor life (or have enjoyed it as I did when I was a boy growing up near the woods, swamps, and marshes near my hometown of Franklin, LA).