Butcher's Crossing

Author: John Williams
Publisher: New York Review of Books
ISBN: 1590174240
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 297

Book Description
Now a major motion picture starring Nicolas Cage and directed by Gabe Polsky. In his National Book Award–winning novel Augustus, John Williams uncovered the secrets of ancient Rome. With Butcher’s Crossing, his fiercely intelligent, beautifully written western, Williams dismantles the myths of modern America. It is the 1870s, and Will Andrews, ﬁred up by Emerson to seek “an original relation to nature,” drops out of Harvard and heads west. He washes up in Butcher’s Crossing, a small Kansas town on the outskirts of nowhere. Butcher’s Crossing is full of restless men looking for ways to make money and ways to waste it. Before long Andrews strikes up a friendship with one of them, a man who regales Andrews with tales of immense herds of buffalo, ready for the taking, hidden away in a beautiful valley deep in the Colorado Rockies. He convinces Andrews to join in an expedition to track the animals down. The journey out is grueling, but at the end is a place of paradisal richness. Once there, however, the three men abandon themselves to an orgy of slaughter, so caught up in killing buffalo that they lose all sense of time. Winter soon overtakes them: they are snowed in. Next spring, half-insane with cabin fever, cold, and hunger, they stagger back to Butcher’s Crossing to ﬁnd a world as irremediably changed as they have been.

Augustus

Author: John Williams
Publisher: New York Review of Books
ISBN: 159017822X
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 337

Book Description
WINNER OF THE 1973 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD By the Author of Stoner In Augustus, his third great novel, John Williams took on an entirely new challenge, a historical narrative set in classical Rome, exploring the life of the founder of the Roman Empire. To tell the story, Williams turned to the epistolary novel, a genre that was new to him, transforming and transcending it just as he did the western in Butcher’s Crossing and the campus novel in Stoner. Augustus is the final triumph of a writer who has come to be recognized around the world as an American master.

Warlock

Author: Oakley Hall
Publisher: New York Review of Books
ISBN: 1590178238
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 488

Book Description
Oakley Hall's legendary Warlock revisits and reworks the traditional conventions of the Western to present a raw, funny, hypnotic, ultimately devastating picture of American unreality. First published in the 1950s, at the height of the McCarthy era, Warlock is not only one of the most original and entertaining of modern American novels but a lasting contribution to American fiction. "Tombstone, Arizona, during the 1880's is, in ways, our national Camelot: a never-never land where American virtues are embodied in the Earps, and the opposite evils in the Clanton gang; where the confrontation at the OK Corral takes on some of the dry purity of the Arthurian joust. Oakley Hall, in his very fine novel Warlock has restored to the myth of Tombstone its full, mortal, blooded humanity. Wyatt Earp is transmogrified into a gunfighter named Blaisdell who . . . is summoned to the embattled town of Warlock by a committee of nervous citizens expressly to be a hero, but finds that he cannot, at last, live up to his image; that there is a flaw not only in him, but also, we feel, in the entire set of assumptions that have allowed the image to exist. . . . Before the agonized epic of Warlock is over with—the rebellion of the proto-Wobblies working in the mines, the struggling for political control of the area, the gunfighting, mob violence, the personal crises of those in power—the collective awareness that is Warlock must face its own inescapable Horror: that what is called society, with its law and order, is as frail, as precarious, as flesh and can be snuffed out and assimilated back into the desert as easily as a corpse can. It is the deep sensitivity to abysses that makes Warlock one of our best American novels. For we are a nation that can, many of us, toss with all aplomb our candy wrapper into the Grand Canyon itself, snap a color shot and drive away; and we need voices like Oakley Hall's to remind us how far that piece of paper, still fluttering brightly behind us, has to fall." —Thomas Pynchon

The Butcher's Daughter

Author: Victoria Glendinning
Publisher: Abrams
ISBN: 1468316346
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 239

Book Description
A woman in Tudor England fends for herself after Henry VIII closes her abbey in this historical novel perfect for fans of Wolf Hall and Philippa Gregory. In 1535, England is hardly a wellspring of gender equality; it is a grim and oppressive age where women―even the privileged few who can read and write―have little independence. In The Butcher’s Daughter, it is this milieu that mandates Agnes Peppin, daughter of a simple country butcher, to leave her family home in disgrace and live out her days cloistered behind the walls of the Shaftesbury Abbey. But with her great intellect, she becomes the assistant to the Abbess and as a result integrates herself into the unstable royal landscape of King Henry VIII. As Agnes grapples with the complex rules and hierarchies of her new life, King Henry VIII has proclaimed himself the new head of the Church. Religious houses are being formally subjugated, monasteries dissolved, and the great Abbey is no exception to the purge. The cosseted world in which Agnes has carved out for herself a sliver of liberty is shattered. Now, free at last to be the master of her own fate, she descends into a world she knows little about, using her wits and testing her moral convictions against her need to survive by any means necessary . . . The Butcher’s Daughter is the riveting story of a young woman facing head-on the obstacles carefully constructed against her sex. This dark and affecting novel by award-winning author Victoria Glendinning intricately depicts the lives of women in the sixteenth century in a world dominated by men. “A fresh perspective [of the Tudor Era]. . . . Glendinning’s research convincingly depicts the bustling and frequently ruthless world of Henry VIII’s England.” —Library Journal “Psychologically astute . . . and evincing deep knowledge of Tudor-era society. Glendinning thoughtfully explores womanhood’s many facets.” —Booklist “Unabashedly feminist . . . elegant, intelligent, compulsively entertaining. . . . [The Butcher’s Daughter] demonstrates the power of individuals with inner strength and determination to work for change when able to choose a life of their own design.” —Foreword Reviews (starred review)

Stoner

Author: John Williams
Publisher: New York Review of Books
ISBN: 1590179285
Category : Adultery
Languages : en
Pages : 337

Book Description
"Born the child of a poor farmer in Missouri, William Stoner is urged by his parents to study new agriculture techniques at the state university. Digging instead into the texts of Milton and Shakespeare, Stoner falls under the spell of the unexpected pleasures of English literature, and decides to make it his life. Stoner is the story of that life"--

The Man Who Wrote the Perfect Novel

Author: Charles J. Shields
Publisher: University of Texas Press
ISBN: 1477317368
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 320

Book Description
When Stoner was published in 1965, the novel sold only a couple of thousand copies before disappearing with hardly a trace. Yet John Williams’s quietly powerful tale of a Midwestern college professor, William Stoner, whose life becomes a parable of solitude and anguish eventually found an admiring audience in America and especially in Europe. The New York Times called Stoner “a perfect novel,” and a host of writers and critics, including Colum McCann, Julian Barnes, Bret Easton Ellis, Ian McEwan, Emma Straub, Ruth Rendell, C. P. Snow, and Irving Howe, praised its artistry. The New Yorker deemed it “a masterly portrait of a truly virtuous and dedicated man.” The Man Who Wrote the Perfect Novel traces the life of Stoner’s author, John Williams. Acclaimed biographer Charles J. Shields follows the whole arc of Williams’s life, which in many ways paralleled that of his titular character, from their shared working-class backgrounds to their undistinguished careers in the halls of academia. Shields vividly recounts Williams’s development as an author, whose other works include the novels Butcher’s Crossing and Augustus (for the latter, Williams shared the 1972 National Book Award). Shields also reveals the astonishing afterlife of Stoner, which garnered new fans with each American reissue, and then became a bestseller all over Europe after Dutch publisher Lebowski brought out a translation in 2013. Since then, Stoner has been published in twenty-one countries and has sold over a million copies.

Butcher Pen Road

Author: Kris Lackey
Publisher: Blackstone Publishing
ISBN: 1982689293
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 171

Book Description
On Oklahoma’s Big Rock Prairie, a deaf boy finds a body in Pennington Creek. Johnston County Deputy Hannah Bond and Chickasaw Lighthorse Police Sergeant Bill Maytubby find a crime scene where nothing seems to fit—from the dead angler’s oversize waders to the kind of fish in his creel. They scour the creekside brush, then hit the road for Texas in a widening search for the killer. On the Big Rock, a towering bearded man is building a limestone replica of Roman Jerusalem for a Christian passion play. His cronies, who are in league with an interstate fraud ring, want the boy to disappear now. Flying an ancient rented Cessna, Maytubby takes fire from a suspect he is tailing, while Bond combs river trails for traces of the killer. While Maytubby and Bond try to protect the deaf boy and his mother from the crime ring, an improbable ally materializes from the prairie oak thickets, wielding a monstrous shotgun.

Redlands

Author: Philip Brookman
Publisher:
ISBN: 9783869306865
Category : Agricultural laborers
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Book Description
Redlands weaves together an intimate sequence of photographs and a short story by Philip Brookman, set in California, Mexico and New York City during the unsettled decades of the 1960s and 1970s. Brookman uses fiction and images from his own photographic diaries to create a first-person account of Kip, an artist who wanders back and forth between farmworkers and poets--between California and New York--seeking to question the meaning of his mother's death. When Kip learns that he can't trust the eyewitness accounts of his sister, he picks up a camera to find meaning in his own experience. By juxtaposing the oppositional strategies of fiction and documentary practice to find an invented narrative, Redlands questions the veracity of logical observation and embraces the poetry of the real world.

X-Men

Author:
Publisher: Marvel
ISBN: 9781302901707
Category : Comics & Graphic Novels
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Book Description
When new villains overthrow the Hellfire Club in a bloody coup, a freshly formed team of X-Men is caught in the middle! But their battle is interrupted when hundreds of escaped convicts arrive from the future - pursued by the ruthless mutant policeman named Bishop! Raised since childhood on the legends of the X-Men, how will Bishop react to meeting his idols? What deadly portent of doom does he carry with him? And why will he quickly set his sights on Gambit? Meanwhile, the rest of the team have their hands full as Colossus' long-lost brother comes back wrong, Storm and Forge's romance reaches a dramatic turning point, and trouble brews for Cyclops and Jean Grey! COLLECTING: UNCANNY X-MEN (1981) 281-293, X-MEN (1991) 8

Dirty Weekend

Author: Helen Zahavi
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780954478117
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 205

Book Description
First published in 1991, Dirty Weekend is the story of a young woman who overcomes her fear and transforms herself from victim to avenger. Over the course of a very dirty weekend she goes out in the night and kills seven men and one myth. The men make the mistake of attacking her. The myth is that only women bleed. 'An act of writing that is avant-garde in the literal sense. A literary turning-point' - "Naomi Wolf, New Statesman & Society" 'A dark and brilliant book' - "The Daily Telegraph" 'Glinting, rapier wit' - "Publishers Weekly" 'Taut prose, black humour and a confrontational style make this a challenging and terrifyingly funny first novel' - "Time Out" 'I can still remember the visceral shock I felt as a young single woman reading Helen Zahavi's first novel, which burst upon a rather staid early-1990s U.K. literary scene like a firework. Every woman who has ever had a fantasy about taking revenge on a man can identify with its heroine' - "Louise Doughty, Wall Street Journal"