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.

Hard Rain Falling

Author: Don Carpenter
Publisher: New York Review of Books
ISBN: 1590173902
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 337

Book Description
A hardboiled novel about life in the American underground, from the pool halls of Portland to the cells of San Quentin. Simply one of the finest books ever written about being down on your luck. Don Carpenter’s Hard Rain Falling is a tough-as-nails account of being down and out, but never down for good—a Dostoyevskian tale of crime, punishment, and the pursuit of an ever-elusive redemption. The novel follows the adventures of Jack Levitt, an orphaned teenager living off his wits in the fleabag hotels and seedy pool halls of Portland, Oregon. Jack befriends Billy Lancing, a young black runaway and pool hustler extraordinaire. A heist gone wrong gets Jack sent to reform school, from which he emerges embittered by abuse and solitary conﬁnement. In the meantime Billy has joined the middle class—married, fathered a son, acquired a business and a mistress. But neither Jack nor Billy can escape their troubled pasts, and they will meet again in San Quentin before their strange double drama comes to a violent and revelatory end.

Blood Meridian

Author: Cormac McCarthy
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0307762521
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 349

Book Description
25th ANNIVERSARY EDITION • From the bestselling author of The Passenger and the Pulitzer Prize–winning novel The Road: an epic novel of the violence and depravity that attended America's westward expansion, brilliantly subverting the conventions of the Western novel and the mythology of the Wild West. Based on historical events that took place on the Texas-Mexico border in the 1850s, Blood Meridian traces the fortunes of the Kid, a fourteen-year-old Tennesseean who stumbles into the nightmarish world where Indians are being murdered and the market for their scalps is thriving. Look for Cormac McCarthy's latest bestselling novels, The Passenger and Stella Maris.

Warlock

Author: Oakley Hall
Publisher: New York Review of Books
ISBN: 1590178238
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 497

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

Nothing but the Night

Author: John Williams
Publisher: New York Review of Books
ISBN: 1681373084
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 145

Book Description
Stoner author John Williams's first novel is a searing look at a man's relationship with his absent father, and how early trauma manifests throughout one's life John Williams’s first novel is a brooding psychological noir. Arthur Maxley is a young man at the end of his emotional rope. Having dropped out of college, he’s holed up in a big-city hotel, living off an allowance from his family, feeling nothing but alone and doing nothing but drinking to forget it. What’s brought him to this point? Something is troubling him, something is haunting him, something he cannot bring himself either to face or to turn away from. And now his father has come to town, a hail-fellow-well-met kind of guy. They’ve been estranged for years, and yet Arthur wants to meet—and so he does, reeling away from the encounter for a night of drinking and dancing and a final reckoning with the traumatizing past that readers will not soon forget. This edition of Nothing but the Night includes an interview with Nancy Gardner Williams, the author’s widow.

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)

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