Download or read book The Last Kind Words Saloon A Novel written by Larry McMurtry and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2014-06-30 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: New York Times Bestseller Named one of the Best Books of the Year by the Seattle Times The Last Kind Words Saloon marks the triumphant return of Larry McMurtry to the nineteenth-century West of his classic Lonesome Dove. In this "comically subversive work of fiction" (Joyce Carol Oates, New York Review of Books), Larry McMurtry chronicles the closing of the American frontier through the travails of two of its most immortal figures, Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday. Tracing their legendary friendship from the settlement of Long Grass, Texas, to Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show in Denver, and finally to Tombstone, Arizona, The Last Kind Words Saloon finds Wyatt and Doc living out the last days of a cowboy lifestyle that is already passing into history. In his stark and peerless prose McMurtry writes of the myths and men that live on even as the storied West that forged them disappears. Hailed by critics and embraced by readers, The Last Kind Words Saloon celebrates the genius of one of our most original American writers.

Download or read book The Last Kind Words Saloon written by Larry McMurtry and published by National Geographic Books. This book was released on 2015-06-30 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: New York Times Bestseller Named one of the Best Books of the Year by the Seattle Times The Last Kind Words Saloon marks the triumphant return of Larry McMurtry to the nineteenth-century West of his classic Lonesome Dove. In this "comically subversive work of fiction" (Joyce Carol Oates, New York Review of Books), Larry McMurtry chronicles the closing of the American frontier through the travails of two of its most immortal figures, Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday. Tracing their legendary friendship from the settlement of Long Grass, Texas, to Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show in Denver, and finally to Tombstone, Arizona, The Last Kind Words Saloon finds Wyatt and Doc living out the last days of a cowboy lifestyle that is already passing into history. In his stark and peerless prose McMurtry writes of the myths and men that live on even as the storied West that forged them disappears. Hailed by critics and embraced by readers, The Last Kind Words Saloon celebrates the genius of one of our most original American writers.

Download or read book Leaving Cheyenne written by Larry McMurtry and published by Liveright Publishing. This book was released on 2018-03-20 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “If Chaucer were a Texan writing today . . . this is how he would have written and this is how he would have felt.”— New York Times In Leaving Cheyenne (1963), which anticipates Lonesome Dove more than any other early novel, the stark realities of the American West play out in a mesmerizing love triangle. Stubborn rancher Gideon Fry, resilient Molly Taylor, and awkward ranch hand Johnny McCloud struggle with love and jealousy as the years pass.

Download or read book The Last Kind Words Saloon A Novel written by Larry McMurtry and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2014-05-07 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday move across the frontier from Long Grass, Texas, to Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show in Denver.

Download or read book The Lonesome Dove Series written by Larry McMurtry and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2010-06-01 with total page 2624 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The timeless, bestselling four-part epic that began with the Pulitzer Prize-winning Lonesome Dove takes readers into the lives of Augustus McCrae and Woodrow Call, two tough-as-nails Texas Rangers in the heyday of the Old West. Dead Man’s Walk As young Texas Rangers, Augustus McCrae and Woodrow Call--"Gus" and "Call" for short--have much to learn about survival in a land fraught with perils: not only the blazing heat and raging tornadoes, roiling rivers and merciless Indians, but also the deadly whims of soldiers. On their first expeditions--led by incompetent officers and accompanied by the robust, dauntless whore known as the Great Western--they will face death at the hands of the cunning Comanche war chief Buffalo Hump and the silent Apache Gomez. They will be astonished by the Mexican army. And Gus will meet the love of his life. Comanche Moon Texas Rangers August McCrae and Woodrow Call, now in their middle years, are still figuring out how to deal with the ever-increasing tensions of adult life--Gus with his great love, Clara Forsythe, and Call with Maggie Tilton, the young whore who loves him--when they sign up to pursue the Comanche horse thief Kicking Wolf into Mexico. On this mission their captain, Inish Scull, is captured by the brutally cruel Mexican bandit Ahumado, and Gus and Call must come to the rescue, with the aid of new friends including Joshua Deets, Jake Spoon, and Pea Eye Parker, as well as the renowned Kickapoo tracker, Famous Shoes. Lonesome Dove Gus and Call, now retired from the Texas Rangers and settled in the border town of Lonesome Dove running the Hat Creek Cattle Company, are visited by their old friend Jake Spoon, who convinces Gus and Call to gather a herd of cattle and drive them north to Montana in order to start a cattle ranch in untouched territory. Gus is further motivated by a desire to see the love of his life, Clara Allen (nee Forsythe), who now lives with her children and comatose horse-trader husband in Ogallala, Nebraska. On the way to Montana they travel through wild country full of thieves, murderers, and a lifetime's worth of unforgettable adventure. Streets of Laredo Woodrow Call is back in Texas, a Ranger once again and a general gun-for-hire, but increasingly a relic as the westward sprawl of the railroads rapidly settles the once lawless frontier. Hired by a railroad tycoon to hunt down a dangerous bandit named Joey Garza, Call sets out once again with a hapless Yankee named Ned Brookshire who works for the railroad company that hired Call. Call's old friend Pea Eye Parker--who initially refused to join the expedition because of his family--sets off with the Kickapoo tracker Famous Shoes to try to catch up with Call, until he runs into troubles of his own. The long pursuit of Garza leads them all across the last wild stretches of the West into a hellhole known as Crow Town and, finally, into the vast, relentless plains of the Texas frontier.

Download or read book Pretty Boy Floyd written by Larry McMurtry and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2010-06-01 with total page 386 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The time is 1925. The place, St. Louis, Missouri. Charley Floyd, a good-looking, sweet-smiling country boy from Oklahoma, is about to rob his first armored car. Written by Pulitzer Prize–winner Larry McMurtry and his writing partner, Diana Ossana, Pretty Boy Floyd traces the wild career of the legendary American folk hero Charley Floyd, a young man so charming that it's hard not to like him, even as he's robbing you at gunpoint. From the bank heists and shootings that make him Public Enemy Number One to the women who love him, from the glamour-hungry nation that worships him to the G-men who track Charley down, Pretty Boy Floyd is both a richly comic masterpiece and an American tragedy about the price of fame and the corruption of innocence.

Download or read book Oh What a Slaughter written by Larry McMurtry and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2010-06-01 with total page 196 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A brilliant and riveting history of the famous and infamous massacres that marked the settling of the American West in the nineteenth century. In Oh What a Slaughter, Larry McMurtry has written a unique, brilliant, and searing history of the bloody massacres that marked—and marred—the settling of the American West in the nineteenth century, and which still provoke immense controversy today. Here are the true stories of the West's most terrible massacres—Sacramento River, Mountain Meadows, Sand Creek, Marias River, Camp Grant, and Wounded Knee, among others. These massacres involved Americans killing Indians, but also Indians killing Americans, and, in the case of the hugely controversial Mountain Meadows Massacre in 1857, Mormons slaughtering a party of American settlers, including women and children. McMurtry's evocative descriptions of these events recall their full horror, and the deep, constant apprehension and dread endured by both pioneers and Indians. By modern standards the death tolls were often small—Custer's famous defeat at Little Big Horn in 1876 was the only encounter to involve more than two hundred dead—yet in the thinly populated West of that time, the violent extinction of a hundred people had a colossal impact on all sides. Though the perpetrators often went unpunished, many guilty and traumatized men felt compelled to tell and retell the horrors they had committed. From letters and diaries, McMurtry has created a moving and swiftly paced narrative, as memorable in its way as such classics as Evan S. Connell's Son of the Morning Star and Dee Brown's Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee. In Larry McMurtry's own words: "I have visited all but one of these famous massacre sites—the Sacramento River massacre of 1846 is so forgotten that its site near the northern California village of Vina can only be approximated. It is no surprise to report that none of the sites are exactly pleasant places to be, though the Camp Grant site north of Tucson does have a pretty community college nearby. In general, the taint that followed the terror still lingers and is still powerful enough to affect locals who happen to live nearby. None of the massacres were effectively covered up, though the Sacramento River massacre was overlooked for a very long time. "But the lesson, if it is a lesson, is that blood—in time, and, often, not that much time—will out. In case after case the dead have managed to assert a surprising potency. "The deep, constant apprehension, which neither the pioneers nor the Indians escaped, has, it seems to me, been too seldom factored in by historians of the settlement era, though certainly it saturates the diary-literature of the pioneers, particularly the diary-literature produced by frontier women, who were, of course, the likeliest candidates for rapine and kidnap."

Download or read book Anything for Billy written by Larry McMurtry and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2010-05-24 with total page 420 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Pulitzer Prize winner’s western “does for the gunfighter what Lonesome Dove did for the trail riding cowboy . . . wistful appeal, larger-than-life characters” (Time). An electrifying take on the classic tale of Billy the Kid, the teenage outlaw of the American Old West, from award-winning, bestselling author Larry McMurtry. The first time I saw Billy, he came walking out of a cloud . . . Welcome to the wild, hot-blooded adventures of Billy the Kid, the American West’s most legendary gunslinger. Larry McMurtry takes us on a hell-for-leather journey with Billy and his friends as they ride, drink, love, fight, shoot, and escape their way into the shining memories of Western myth. Surrounded by a splendid cast of characters that only Larry McMurtry could create, Billy charges headlong toward his fate, to become in death the unforgettable desperado he aspires to be in life. Not since Lonesome Dove has there been such a rich, exciting novel about the cowboys, Indians, and gunmen who live at the blazing heart of the American dream. “This tale of random violence, unlikely romance and quicksilver friendships in the old West is a rip-roaring gamble with a tear in its eye, and it pays off in spades.” —Publishers Weekly “Entertaining and peopled with . . . beguiling characters. McMurtry drills a bull’s eye, proving that he is among the most versatile of our writers.” —Library Journal “Storytelling at its best, the West at its fiercest, and McMurtry in his prime.” —The Seattle Times

Download or read book The Last Kind Words written by Tom Piccirilli and published by Bantam. This book was released on 2012-06-12 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From award-winning author Tom Piccirilli comes what Lee Child calls “perfect crime fiction,” a wholly original novel introducing the Rands, a vipers’ nest of crooks and cons, one generation stealing from the next. Upon the razor-thin edge between love and violence lives a pair of brothers, their bonds frayed by betrayals and guilt, their loyalty to each other their last salvation. Raised to pick a pocket before he could walk, Terry Rand cut free from his family after his older brother, Collie, went on a senseless killing spree that left eight dead. Five years later, only days before his scheduled execution, Collie contacts Terry and asks him to return home. Collie claims he wasn’t responsible for one of the murders—and insists that the real killer is still on the loose. Dogged by his own demons, Terry is swept back into the schemes and scams of his family: His father, Pinsch, a retired cat burglar, brokenhearted because of his two sons. His card-sharp uncles, Mal and Grey, who’ve incurred the anger of the local mob. His grandfather, Shep, whose mind is failing but whose fingers can still slip out a wallet from across the room. His teenage sister, Dale, who’s flirting dangerously with the lure of the family business. And Kimmie, the woman Terry abandoned, who’s now raising a child with Terry’s former best friend. Terry pieces together the day his brother turned rabid, delving into a blood history that reveals the Rand family tree is rotten to the roots, and the secrets his ancestors buried are now coming furious and vengeful to the surface. A meditation on how love can confine a person just as easily as it can free him, juxtaposing shocking violence and sly humor, The Last Kind Words is the brilliantly inventive family saga that only a singular talent like Tom Piccirilli could conjure. Includes a preview of Tom Piccirilli’s next book, The Last Whisper in the Dark. Praise for The Last Kind Words “A crime noir mystery as hard-boiled as any in recent memory, recalling the work of Chandler, Pelecanos and Connelly . . . Readers literally will be pinned to their seats until the last page is turned.”—Bookreporter “At once a dark and brooding page-turner and a heartfelt tale about the ties that bind.”—Lisa Unger, New York Times bestselling author of Heartbroken “[A] caustic thriller . . . The characters have strong voices and bristle with funny quirks.”—The New York Times Book Review “[Piccirilli] deserves a breakout novel, and this just might be it.”—Booklist (starred review)

Download or read book Crazy Horse written by Kingsley M. Bray and published by University of Oklahoma Press. This book was released on 2011-11-19 with total page 532 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Crazy Horse was as much feared by tribal foes as he was honored by allies. His war record was unmatched by any of his peers, and his rout of Custer at the Little Bighorn reverberates through history. Yet so much about him is unknown or steeped in legend. Crazy Horse: A Lakota Life corrects older, idealized accounts—and draws on a greater variety of sources than other recent biographies—to expose the real Crazy Horse: not the brash Sioux warrior we have come to expect but a modest, reflective man whose courage was anchored in Lakota piety. Kingsley M. Bray has plumbed interviews of Crazy Horse’s contemporaries and consulted modern Lakotas to fill in vital details of Crazy Horse’s inner and public life. Bray places Crazy Horse within the rich context of the nineteenth-century Lakota world. He reassesses the war chief’s achievements in numerous battles and retraces the tragic sequence of misunderstandings, betrayals, and misjudgments that led to his death. Bray also explores the private tragedies that marred Crazy Horse’s childhood and the network of relationships that shaped his adult life. To this day, Crazy Horse remains a compelling symbol of resistance for modern Lakotas. Crazy Horse: A Lakota Life is a singular achievement, scholarly and authoritative, offering a complete portrait of the man and a fuller understanding of his place in American Indian and United States history.

Download or read book Streets Of Laredo written by Larry McMurtry and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2010-06-01 with total page 544 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the Pulitzer Prize–winning author Larry McMurtry comes the sequel and final book in the Lonesome Dove tetralogy. An exhilarating tale of legend and heroism, Streets of Laredo is classic Texas and Western literature at its finest. Captain Woodrow Call, August McCrae's old partner, is now a bounty hunter hired to track down a brutal young Mexican bandit. Riding with Call are an Eastern city slicker, a witless deputy, and one of the last members of the Hat Creek outfit, Pea Eye Parker, now married to Lorena—once Gus McCrae's sweetheart. This long chase leads them across the last wild streches of the West into a hellhole known as Crow Town and, finally, into the vast, relentless plains of the Texas frontier.

Download or read book Horseman Pass by written by Larry McMurtry and published by Pocket Books. This book was released on 1992 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When Larry McMurtry's classic novel of the post-World War II era was originally published in 1961, it created a sensation in Texas literary circles. Never before had a writer portrayed the contemporary West in conflict with the Old West in such stark, realistic, unsentimental ways. "Horseman, Pass By," on which the film "Hud" is based, tells the story of Homer Bannon, an old-time cattleman who epitomizes the frontier values of honesty and decency, and Hud, his unscrupulous stepson. Caught in the middle is the narrator, Homer's young grandson, Lonnie, who is as much drawn to his grandfather's strength of character as he is to Hud's hedonism and materialism. Memorable characters, powerful themes, and illuminating detail make "Horseman, Pass By" vintage McMurtry.

Download or read book Somebody s Darling A Novel written by Larry McMurtry and published by Liveright Publishing. This book was released on 2018-10-02 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The personal and professional struggles of McMurtry’s lively protagonist Jill Peel, a director in 1970s Hollywood, takes on new resonance in the twenty-first century. Forty years ago, Larry McMurtry journeyed from the sprawling ranches of his early work to the provocative Sunset Strip, creating a Hollywood fable that is both immediate and relevant in today’s dynamic cultural climate. One would never guess that Jill Peel is still on the verge of stardom. Jill won an Oscar shortly after her fresh-faced arrival in 1950s Hollywood, then for the next twenty years batted away every Tinseltown producer who tried to hire her and get her into bed. Now middle-aged, she’s determined to create more movie magic by directing a cast of raunchy eccentrics, including Joe Percy, an aging womanizing screenwriter, and ex-football player Owen Oarson, eager to sleep his way to leading-man stardom. Teeming with biting humor and intriguing characters that mirror the scandals of modern-day Hollywood, Somebody’s Darling is a timeless story about a fiercely capable woman who dares to challenge the realities of a deceptively seductive Babel.

Download or read book Terms of Endearment written by Larry McMurtry and published by Pan Macmillan. This book was released on 2015-10-08 with total page 401 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this acclaimed novel that inspired the Academy Award-winning film, Pulitzer Prize-winner Larry McMurtry created two unforgettable characters who won the hearts of readers and film-goers everywhere: Aurora Greenway and her daughter, Emma. Aurora is the kind of woman who makes the whole world orbit around her, including a string of devoted suitors. Widowed and overprotective of her daughter, Aurora adapts at her own pace until life sends two enormous challenges her way: Emma's hasty marriage and subsequent battle with cancer. Terms of Endearment is the story of an unforgettable mother and her feisty daughter and their struggle to find the courage and humour to live through life's hazards – and to love each other as never before.

Download or read book Sacagawea s Nickname written by Larry McMurtry and published by New York Review of Books. This book was released on 2001 with total page 196 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In these 11 essays, all originally published in "The New York Review of Books," McMurtry brings his unique narrative gift and dry humor to a variety of western topics.

Download or read book Thalia A Texas Trilogy written by Larry McMurtry and published by Liveright Publishing. This book was released on 2017-09-19 with total page 784 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The renaissance of Larry McMurtry, “an alchemist who converts the basest materials to gold” (New York Times Book Review), continues with the publication of Thalia. Larry McMurtry burst onto the American literary scene with a force that would forever redefine how we perceive the American West. His first three novels— Horseman, Pass By (1961),* Leaving Cheyenne (1963), and The Last Picture Show (1966)— all set in the north Texas town of Thalia after World War II, are collected here for the first time. In this trilogy, McMurtry writes tragically of men and women trying to carve out an existence on the plains, where the forces of modernity challenge small- town American life. From a cattleranch rivalry that confirms McMurtry’s “full- blooded Western genius” (Publishers Weekly) to a love triangle involving a cowboy, his rancher boss and wife, and finally to the hardscrabble citizens of an oil- patch town trying to keep their only movie house alive, McMurtry captures the stark realities of the West like no one else. With a new introduction, Thalia emerges as an American classic that celebrates one of our greatest literary masters. *Just named in 2017 by Publishers Weekly the #1 Western novel worthy of rediscovery.

Download or read book All My Friends Are Going to Be Strangers A Novel written by Larry McMurtry and published by Liveright Publishing. This book was released on 2018-05-29 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A young writer hits the dusty Texas highway for the California coast in this “brilliant . . . funny and dangerously tender” (Time) tale of art and sacrifice. Hailed 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.