Our 3 Book Picks for the Holidays

Kent Haruf

National bestselling author and Colorado native Kent Haruf’s new book Benediction let’s readers return to  Holt in a story filled with memories and lamenting. Haruf was kind  enough to geolocate the town in his mind.

How real is Holt, Colorado?

It’s a work of imagination—a thing informed by all the years you’ve lived and all the people you’ve met, and your experience of humanity.

Will you return to Holt in another book?

Oh, yeah. I’m stuck there. Once I invented that county and that town, I felt as though I knew everybody there. I have it emphatically and clearly in my mind. All the dogs, the pickups, and bicycles. Main Street runs north and south. The highway east and west. In a house, I always make sure the sun comes in through the right window. They’ve become mythic details for me. And it’s become a fundamental universal type of town.

What kind of stories do you like to tell?

Character-driven ones. There are no chases, no murders or sexual scenes—my stories are all based on characters that I imagine, and I think about how they have to have problems and how they respond to these problems. The way they respond to them becomes the story, becomes the plot, and so there’s a whole series of cause-and-effect. I want to think that even though these characters and these situations are set in a small, eastern Colorado town that they are universal—there are men dying all the time, and that’s not a situation exclusive to Colorado.

Most memorable holiday gift?

When my brother and I were 10 and 11, we received an electric football game. You had to plug it in and the table vibrated, and the little football players moved. You’d turn it off and set them all up for a play, and you’d turn it on and they’d move along the field.