In the 1920s, the richest people per capita in the world were members of the Osage Nation in Oklahoma. After oil was discovered beneath their land, the Osage rode in chauffeured automobiles, built mansions, and sent their children to study in Europe.

The year is 1823, and the trappers of the Rocky Mountain Fur Company live a brutal frontier life. Hugh Glass is among the company's finest men, an experienced frontiersman and an expert tracker. But when a scouting mission puts him face-to-face with a grizzly bear, he is viciously mauled and not expected to survive. Two company men are dispatched to stay behind and tend to Glass before he dies. When the men abandon him instead, Glass is driven to survive by one desire: revenge.

In the spring of 1885, 17-year-old Jessilyn Harney finds herself orphaned and alone on her family's homestead. Desperate to fend off starvation and predatory neighbors, she cuts off her hair, binds her chest, saddles her beloved mare, and sets off across the mountains to find her outlaw brother Noah and bring him home. A talented sharpshooter herself, Jess' quest lands her in the employ of the territory's violent, capricious governor, whose militia is also hunting Noah - dead or alive.

Author of the National Book Award-winning All the Pretty Horses, Cormac McCarthy is one of the most provocative American stylists to emerge in the last century. The striking novel Blood Meridian offers an unflinching narrative of the brutality that accompanied the push west on the 1850s Texas frontier.

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.

The Ghost Writer introduces Nathan Zuckerman in the 1950s, a budding writer infatuated with the great books, discovering the contradictory claims of literature and experience while an overnight guest in the secluded New England farmhouse of his idol, E. I. Lonoff. At Lonoff's, Zuckerman meets Amy Bellette, a haunting young woman of indeterminate foreign background who turns out to be a former student of Lonoff's and who may also have been his mistress.

Sixteen-year-old John Grady Cole's grandfather has just died, his parents have permanently separated, and the family ranch, upon which he had placed so many boyish hopes, has been sold. Rootless and increasingly restive, Cole leaves Texas, accompanied by his friend Lacey Rawlins, and begins a journey across the vaquero frontier into the badlands of northern Mexico.

The Brave Cowboy is a classic of modern Western literature. It follows Jack Burns, a loner at odds with modern civilization. He rides a feisty chestnut mare across the New West—a once beautiful land now smothered beneath airstrips and superhighways. An "anarchist cowboy," he lives by a personal code of ethics that sets him on a collision course with the keepers of law and order. After a prison breakout plan goes awry, he finds himself and his horse, Whisky, pursued across the desert towards the mountains that lead to Mexico, and to freedom.

Hermann Kermit Warm is going to die. The enigmatic and powerful man known only as the Commodore has ordered it, and his henchmen, Eli and Charlie Sisters, will make sure of it. Though Eli doesn't share his brother's appetite for whiskey and killing, he's never known anything else. But their prey isn't an easy mark, and on the road from Oregon City to Warm's gold-mining claim outside Sacramento, Eli begins to question what he does for a living - and whom he does it for. With The Sisters Brothers, Patrick deWitt pays homage to the classic Western....

In this taut, chilling audiobook, Lester Ballard - a violent, dispossessed man falsely accused of rape - haunts the hill country of East Tennessee when he is released from jail. While telling his story, Cormac McCarthy depicts the most sordid aspects of life with dignity, humor, and characteristic lyrical brilliance.

Ordered to hold an abandoned army post, John Dunbar found himself alone, beyond the edge of civilization. Thievery and survival soon forced him into the Indian camp, where he began a dangerous adventure that changed his life forever. Set in 1863, the novel follows Lieutenant John Dunbar on a magical journey from the ravages of the Civil War to the far reaches of the imperiled American frontier, a frontier he naively wants to see "before it is gone".

Mattie Ross, a 14-year-old girl from Dardanelle, Arkansas, sets out to avenge her Daddy who was shot to death by a no-good outlaw. Mattie convinces one-eyed "Rooster" Cogburn, the meanest U.S. marshal in the land, to ride along with her. In True Grit, we have a true American classic, as young Mattie, as vital as she is innocent, outdickers and outmaneuvers the hard-bitten men of the trail in a legend that will last through the ages.

Outer Dark is a novel at once fabular and starkly evocative, set is an unspecified place in Appalachia, sometime around the turn of the century. A woman bears her brother's child, a boy; he leaves the baby in the woods and tells her he died of natural causes. Discovering her brother's lie, she sets forth alone to find her son. Both brother and sister wander separately through a countryside being scourged by three terrifying and elusive strangers, headlong toward an eerie, apocalyptic resolution.

Wyatt Gwyon's desire to forge is not driven by larceny but from love. Exactingly faithful to the spirit and letter of the Flemish masters, he produces uncannily accurate "originals" - pictures the painters themselves might have envied. In an age of counterfeit emotion and taste, the real and fake have become indistinguishable; yet Gwyon's forgeries reflect a truth that others cannot touch - cannot even recognize.

The classic samurai novel about the real exploits of the most famous swordsman. Miyamoto Musashi becomes a reluctant hero to a host of people whose lives he has touched and by whom he has been touched. Inevitably, he has to pit his skill against the naked blade of his greatest rival.

Mauled by a giant grizzly and left to die, 16 year-old Jose Olano's chances for life were remote. Then, like a guardian angel, came Robert "Gray Eagle" McAllister, one-time army scout and sometime outlaw. In his flight to escape a posse, he finds the brutalized body of Jose. Knowing his decision to help Jose may mean his own death, he stays and brings Jose back from the brink of death. Thus began one of the greatest companionships ever known to the Idaho frontier.

A classic about the American West and the life and times of one tough cowboy, Monte Walsh. Partial to pretty women, gambling, and practical jokes, Monte doesn't have to look far to find trouble. Luckily for him, Monte's best friend, Chet, is always there to post bail or quickly get Monte out of town. As Monte grows older, though, and the West inevitably changes, he resists changing with it, and shows his dedication and loyalty to the cowboy way of life.

Brighty, a shaggy young burro, lives wild and free in the Grand Canyon of Arizona. He roams the steep cliffs with the squirrels and rabbits. But his favorite friend is Old Timer, the prospector who shares hot biscuits and calls him Bright Angel. One day Old Timer doesn't answer Brighty's loud "Eeeee-aw!" Instead, the friendly animal encounters a ruthless claim jumper. Will Brighty be able to bring the killer to justice and make the wilderness safe again?

Arizona Ranger Sam Burrack thought he’d seen every despicable act of cruelty and murder any man could exact on another. He thought wrong. When he stumbles upon the butchered remains of a scalp-taking massacre, he’s choked with disgust. So Burrack teams up with veteran Sheriff Boyd Tackett, who’s more than willing to help bring these vile rats to justice.

A soaring work of the imagination based on oral histories of the post - Civil War years in North Texas, Paulette Jiles's The Color of Lightning is at once an intimate look into the hearts and hopes of tragically flawed human beings and a courageous reexamination of a dark American history.

Set in familiar Steinbeck territory, To a God Unknown is a mystical tale, exploring one man's attempt to control the forces of nature and, ultimately, to understand the ways of God.

When four old University friends set off into the Scandinavian wilderness of the Arctic Circle, they aim to briefly escape the problems of their lives and reconnect with one another. But when Luke, the only man still single and living a precarious existence, finds he has little left in common with his well-heeled friends, tensions rise. With limited experience between them, a shortcut meant to ease their hike turns into a nightmare scenario that could cost them their lives. Lost, hungry, and surrounded by forest untouched for millennia, Luke figures things couldn't possibly get any worse.

Robert Jackson Bennett makes a stunning debut with this deliciously dark tale sure to hold readers in its menacing thrall. The grinding poverty brought on by the Great Depression is nowhere more apparent than in the untold thousands looking for work along America’s railroad system. But one man haunting the rail camps has been moved by an entirely different brand of desperation: revenge.

One of America’s most celebrated novelists, Cormac McCarthy announced his towering presence on the literary stage with his first novel, The Orchard Keeper. Within the pages of this classic work, John Wesley Rattner, his uncle Ather, and bootlegger Marion Sylder find their lives dangerously entwined in pre-World War II Tennessee. There, the men’s tragedies and struggles are mirrored by the looming specter of industrialization.

In 1836, when she was nine years old, Cynthia Ann Parker was kidnapped by Comanche Indians. This is the story of how she grew up with them, mastered their ways, married one of their leaders, and became, in every way, a Comanche woman. It is also the story of a proud and innocent people whose lives pulsed with the very heartbeat of the land. It is the story of a way of life that is gone forever.

Lee Westfall has a strong, loving family. She has a home she loves and a loyal steed. She has a best friend - who might want to be something more. She also has a secret.

A Penguin Classic. First published in 1938, this volume of stories collected with the encouragement of his longtime editor Pascal Covici serves as a wonderful introduction to the work of Nobel Prize winner John Steinbeck. Set in the beautiful Salinas Valley of California, where simple people farm the land and struggle to find a place for themselves in the world, these stories reflect Steinbeck’s characteristic interests: The tensions between town and country, laborers and owners, past and present.

This epic tale sweeps across continents and time, hovers over a key era in American history, and deftly realizes the humanity of a whole cast of characters. Told through flashbacks and alternating points of view, The Last Crossing is about redemption, about seeking and finding, about human feelings and strengths, about personal honor, and about that moment in life when we must decide to cross over and surrender to love.

Can a rough Texas Ranger overcome a woman’s hardened heart? Amanda Ross returns from her Boston finishing school to claim the Texas ranch her parents died fighting to protect. Determined to protect the sprawling ranch that has been in her family for generations, Amanda hates the Comanche people for taking away her only family. Clay McAlester may be a Texas Ranger, but he identifies most strongly with the Comanche people that raised him.

The Bondurant Boys were a notorious gang of roughnecks and moonshiners who ran liquor through Franklin County during Prohibition and after. The brothers played a central role in a major conspiracy trial and its violent end. In 1935, Sherwood Anderson, working on a magazine story, finds himself driving along the dusty red roads trying to find the brothers and break the silence that shrouds Franklin County.

Sono gli anni Settanta dell'Ottocento. Will Andrews, dopo tre anni a Harvard, lascia il Massachusetts e, pieno di vaghi sogni e aspirazioni emersoniane verso la Natura Selvaggia, va all'Ovest. Si trova così a Butcher's Crossing, poco più che un rozzo accampamento ai margini del nulla abitato da uomini duri, sempre in cerca di un modo per fare soldi, o per scialacquarli. È proprio uno di questi individui che racconta all'ex studente di una meravigliosa valle nascosta tra le Rocky Mountains, popolata di immense mandrie di bisonti che non hanno mai conosciuto l'odore, o il fucile, dell'uomo.

First published in 1948, Nothing but the Night marked the auspicious beginning of John Williams' career as a novelist. In the person of Arthur Maxley, Williams investigates the terror and the waywardness of a man who has suffered an early traumatic experience. As a child, Maxley witnessed a scene of such violence and of such a nature that the evocation of Greek tragedy is inescapable. Now, years later, we move through a single significant day in the grown Arthur Maxley's life, the day when he is to meet his father, who has been absent for many years.

A mere 18 years of age when his uncle, Julius Caesar, is murdered, Octavius Caesar prematurely inherits rule of the Roman Republic. Surrounded by men who are jockeying for power—Cicero, Brutus, Cassius, and Mark Antony—young Octavius must work against the powerful Roman political machinations to claim his destiny as first Roman emperor. Sprung from meticulous research and the pen of a true poet, Augustus tells the story of one man’s dream to liberate a corrupt Rome.

William Stoner is born at the end of the 19th century into a dirt-poor Missouri farming family. Sent to the state university to study agronomy, he instead falls in love with English literature and embraces a scholar's life, far different from the hardscrabble existence he has known. And yet as the years pass, Stoner encounters a succession of disappointments.

Året er 1873, og Will Andrews opgiver sine universitetsstudier ved Harvard og drager vestpå. Han ender i Butcher's Crossing, en lille, gudsforladt flaekke i Kansas. Butcher's Crossing er fuld af rastløse maend, der kun taenker på at tjene hurtige penge og bruge dem lige så hurtigt, blandt dem Miller. Han og Andrews bliver venner, og Andrews fascineres af Millers historie om en enorm bisonflok, der kun venter på at blive nedslagtet, godt gemt af vejen i en smuk dal i Rocky Mountains i Colorado.

Samuel Chamberlain's My Confession is a quintessential American tale of a young man's unbridled escapades across the vastness of the Western Frontier. From humble beginnings in Boston, Chamberlain journeyed to Texas to fight in the Mexican-American War and eventually fell in with the notorious Glanton Gang, a brutal group of scalp-hunters immortalized in Cormac McCarthy's Western masterpiece Blood Meridian.

Hermann Kermit Warm is going to die. The enigmatic and powerful man known only as the Commodore has ordered it, and his henchmen, Eli and Charlie Sisters, will make sure of it. Though Eli doesn't share his brother's appetite for whiskey and killing, he's never known anything else. But their prey isn't an easy mark, and on the road from Oregon City to Warm's gold-mining claim outside Sacramento, Eli begins to question what he does for a living - and whom he does it for. With The Sisters Brothers, Patrick deWitt pays homage to the classic Western....

The Shootist is John Bernard Books, a man of principle and the only surviving gunfighter in a vanishing American West. He rides into El Paso in the year 1901, on the day of Queen Victoria's demise, there to be told by a doctor that he must soon confront the greatest Shootist of all: Death himself. In such a showdown against such an antagonist, J. B. Books cannot win. Most men may end their days in bed or take their own lives, but a mankiller has a third option, one which Books decides to exercise. He may choose his own executioner.

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 connement. In the meantime Billy has joined the middle class - married, fathered a son, acquired a business and a mistress. But they will meet again....

His father killed by the British and his home burned, young Tatton Chantry left Ireland to make his fortune and regain the land that was rightfully his. Schooled along the way in the use of arms, Chantry arrives in London a wiser and far more dangerous man. He invests in trading ventures, but on a voyage to the New World his party is attacked by Indians and he is marooned in the untamed wilderness of the Carolina coast. It is in this darkest time, when everything seems lost, that Chantry encounters a remarkable opportunity....

In this taut, chilling audiobook, Lester Ballard - a violent, dispossessed man falsely accused of rape - haunts the hill country of East Tennessee when he is released from jail. While telling his story, Cormac McCarthy depicts the most sordid aspects of life with dignity, humor, and characteristic lyrical brilliance.