Generally Death Comes for the Archbishop, My Antonia, O Pioneers!, and The Song of the Lark are considered her top tier, so if you’re interested in reading more, I’d start with one of those. Death Comes for the Archbishop is unique in her work for its southwestern setting. The others are set in the Great Plains, where Cather grew up, but they have the same beauty of language and setting. Some of her stories have more defined plots than others, but the episodicness of the stories is definitely a feature, not a bug in most of them.

Shadows on the Rock is also an interesting companion piece to Death Comes for the Archbishop–it was written around the same time, when Cather had become obsessed with Catholicism. Both books are about the settlement of Catholicism in the New World and the people who grew up around these settlements, but Shadows on the Rock is about Quebec instead of New Mexico. Death Comes for the Archbishop is definitely a stronger work overall, but it’s interesting to read them together.

I’m pretty sure that program was costing them more money to run than it was making, thus why they cut back on it. Anybody who bothered to sign up was a pretty heavy borrower of e-books, and those are expensive on the library’s side.

Certainly within the realm of possibility, but by no means “widely accepted.” She was non-conforming by her society’s gender standards, but in ways that don’t really map neatly to our own society’s definitions of gender. She may have been what we think of as trans, bisexual, or just a non-conformist straight woman–there isn’t really enough evidence to point at any of those conclusions definitively.