Adventure fiction: Westerns

Book SynopsisFor the first time, a collected edition of the major works of John Williams, including the acclaimed novel Stoner.John Williams’s three major works have come to be recognized as modern American classics and are collected in this Library of America volume for the first time. In Butcher’s Crossing, he unsettles the conventions of the Western novel to tell the haunting story of a buffalo hunting expedition that exposes the savagery and greed behind the myth of the frontier. In Stoner, he portrays power politics in academe and the quiet heroism of a midwestern English professor dedicated to the honest and dogged pursuit of his craft. In Augustus, set in ancient Rome, Williams again takes on the subject of power—more particularly, in the author’s own words, “the ambivalence between the public necessity and the private want or need.” Rounding out the volume are three essays by Williams on writing fiction and his speech upon accepting the National Book Award for Augustus in 1973. 

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Book SynopsisThe ultimate Portis: for the first time in one collector''s volume, the complete fiction and collected nonfiction of the author of True GritSummer reading recommendation in THE WASHINGTON POST, THE WALL STREET JOURNAL, and THE MILWAUKEE JOURNAL SENTINEL"Charles Portis is one of the great pure pleasures available in American literature." —Ron Rosenbaum"Like Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn and Thomas Berger’s Little Big Man, Charles Portis’s True Grit captures the naïve elegance of the American voice." —Jonathan Lethem"No living Southern writer captures the spoken idioms of the South as artfully as Portis does." —Donna Tartt"His fiction is the funniest I know." —Roy Blount, Jr.Twice adapted as a film, first in a version starring John Wayne and then by the Coen Brothers, True Grit is a wonder of novelistic perfection, told in the unforgettable voice of 14-year-old Mattie Ross as she sets out to avenge her murdered father in a quest that brings her out of her native Arkansas and into the wilds of the Choctaw Nation of the 1870s. One of the great literary Westerns, it is also a novel that has invited comparison with The Wizard of Oz, Alice in Wonderland, and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Portis''s deadpan debut novel Norwood (1966) is, like True Grit, the story of a quest, though here the stakes are far lower: an auto mechanic from Texas embarks on a madcap journey to New York City to try and recover $70 owed to him from an Army buddy.   A book that according to Roy Blount Jr. “no one should die without having read,” The Dog of the South (1979) is yet a third saga of pursuit, this time all the way to Central America. Ray Midge is on the road looking for the man who has run off with his car (and of somewhat less interest to him, his wife.)Masters of Atlantis (1985) conjures the fictional cult of Gnomonism and takes an uproarious plunge into the dark heart of conspiratorial thinking and schismatic in-fighting.Gringos (1991), set in Mexico, follows an expatriate ex-Marine in his search to find a UFO hunter gone missing in the Yucatan, amid a supporting cast of archaeologists, drug-addled hippie millenarians, and the son of the “bravest dog in all Mexico.”A generous gathering of the nonfiction reveals Portis''s skills as a reporter, above all in his coverage of the Civil Rights Movement; his appreciation of Arkansas history and landscape, as in “The Forgotten River”; and his poignancy as a family memoirist, on display in his recollection “Combinations of Jacksons.”

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Book SynopsisHailed as one of “the best novels ever set in America’s fourth largest city” (Douglas Brinkley, New York Times Book Review), All My Friends Are Going to Be Strangers is a powerful demonstration of Larry McMurtry’s “comic genius, his ability to render a sense of landscape, and interior intellection tension” (Jim Harrison, New York Times Book Review). Desperate to break from the “mundane happiness” of Houston, budding writer Danny Deck hops in his car, “El Chevy,” bound for the West Coast on a road trip filled with broken hearts and bleak realities of the artistic life. A cast of unforgettable characters joins the naive troubadour’s pilgrimage to California and back to Texas, including a cruel, long-legged beauty; an appealing screenwriter; a randy college professor; and a genuine if painfully “normal” friend. Since the novel’s publication in 1972, Danny Deck has “been far more successful at getting loved by readers than he ever was at getting loved by the women in his life” (McMurtry), a testament to the author’s incomparable talent for capturing the essential tragicomedy of the human experience.

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Book SynopsisThe Last Picture Show (1966) is both a rambunctious coming-of-age story and an elegy to a forlorn Texas town trying to keep its one movie house alive. Adapted into the Oscar-winning film, this masterpiece immortalizes the lives of the hardscrabble residents who are threatened by the inexorable forces of the modern world.

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