From the bestselling, Pulitzer Prize-winning "absolute master of 'Western' prose," comes McMurtry's electrifying take on the classic tale of Billy the Kid, the teenage outlaw of the American Old West. 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 outlaw. 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.
From dusty flea markets in Texas to parties in Washington, DC, crawling with political hacks, Cadillac Jack is a classic American novel, timelier than ever. Larry McMurtry’s “big hearted” fiction has been lauded for “taking us places we hadn’t known existed” (Joyce Carol Oates, New York Review of Books). Cadillac Jack does exactly that, inviting readers into the passenger seat of a pearl-colored Caddy with peach velour–covered seats, joining a rodeo-bulldogger-turned-antique- scout at the wheel. “Superbly comic” (Newsday), this rollicking tale echoes the cultural climate of America today, with the cagey yet charming Jack grappling with the capitol’s pretentious elite. As he cruises through relationships with distinctively appealing women—including socialite boutique owner Cindy and discreet mother-of-two Jean—Jack realizes home for him will always be simply barreling down freeways in his Cadillac, wandering the country in search of another obscure treasure. Bolstered with its cast of unforgettable characters, Cadillac Jack entices with the prospect of undiscovered riches around that next bend in the road.
Newbery Honor Book and New York Times Bestseller! Award-winning, nationally bestselling author Kevin Henkes introduces second-grader Billy Miller in this fast-paced and funny story about friendship, sibling rivalry, and elementary school. The Year of Billy Miller includes black-and-white art by Kevin Henkes and is perfect for fans of the Ramona books; Frindle, by Andrew Clements; and the Clementine series. The New York Times declared: "Henkes's delightful story is restrained and vivid . . . forgoing the overdramatic or zany, it shows the substance, warmth and adaptability of beautifully common family love." When Billy Miller has a mishap at the statue of the Jolly Green Giant at the end of summer vacation, he ends up with a big lump on his head. What a way to start second grade! As the year goes by, though, Billy figures out how to navigate elementary school, how to appreciate his little sister, and how to be a more grown up and responsible member of the family and a help to his busy working mom and stay-at-home dad. Newbery Honor author and Caldecott Medalist Kevin Henkes delivers a short, satisfying, laugh-out-loud-funny school and family story that features a diorama homework assignment, a school poetry slam, cancelled sleepovers, and epic sibling temper tantrums. This is a perfect short novel for the early elementary grades. Plus don't miss the follow-up, Billy Miller Makes a Wish!
Boone's Lick is Pulitzer Prize-winning author Larry McMurtry's return to the kind of story that made him famous -- an enthralling tale of the nineteenth-century west. Like his bestsellers Lonesome Dove, Streets of Laredo, Comanche Moon, and Dead Man's Walk, Boone's Lick transports the reader to the era about which McMurtry writes better and more shrewdly than anyone else. Told with McMurtry's unique blend of historical fact and sheer storytelling genius, the novel follows the Cecil family's arduous journey by riverboat and wagon from Boone's Lick, Missouri, to Fort Phil Kearny in Wyoming. Fifteen-year-old Shay narrates, describing the journey that begins when his Ma, Mary Margaret, decides to hunt down her elusive husband, Dick, to tell him she's leaving him. Without knowing precisely where he is, they set out across the plains in search of him, encountering grizzly bears, stormy weather, and hostile Indians as they go. With them are Shay's siblings, G.T., Neva, and baby Marcy; Shay's uncle, Seth; his Granpa Crackenthorpe; and Mary Margaret's beautiful half-sister, Rose. During their journey they pick up a barefooted priest named Father Villy, and a Snake Indian named Charlie Seven Days, and persuade them to join in their travels. At the heart of the novel, and the adventure, is Mary Margaret, whom we first meet shooting a sheriff's horse out from underneath him in order to feed her family. Forceful, interesting, and determined, she is written with McMurtry's trademark deftness and sympathy for women, and is in every way a match for the worst the west can muster. Boone's Lick abounds with the incidents, the excitements, and the dangers of life on the plains. Its huge cast of characters includes such historical figures as Wild Bill Hickok and the unfortunate Colonel Fetterman (whose arrogance and ineptitude led to one of the U.S. Army's worst and bloodiest defeats at the hands of the Cheyenne and Sioux) as well as the Cecil family (itself based on a real family of nineteenth-century traders and haulers). The story of their trek in pursuit of Dick, and the discovery of his second and third families, is told with brilliance, humor, and overwhelming joie de vivre in a novel that is at once high adventure, a perfect western tale, and a moving love story -- it is, in short, vintage McMurtry, combining his brilliant character portraits, his unerring sense of the west, and his unrivaled eye for the telling detail. Boone's Lick is one of McMurtry's richest works of fiction to date.
McMurtry's follow-up to All My Friends Are Going to Be Strangers will capture a whole new audience, opening up the world of the now-millionaire Danny Deck and his strong and passionate daughter T.R.. "Mr. Deck, are you my stinkin' Daddy?" In a furious phone call from T.R., the daughter he's never met, Danny Deck gets the jolt of his life. A TV writer who's retired to his Texas mansion, Danny spends his days talking to the answering machines of his ex-lovers from New York to Paris and dreaming of the characters in the sitcom he's created. But suddenly, a hurricane called T.R. is storming into his life... In his most moving and richly comic contemporary novel since Texasville, Larry McMurtry returns to the modern West he created so masterfully in The Last Picture Show and Terms of Endearment. Some Can Whistle spins a tale of Hollywood glitz and Texas grit; of an extraordinary young woman and a murderous young man; and of a middle-aged millionaire running head-on into the longings, joys, and pathos of real life.
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.
To open this book is to enter the perilous, thrilling world of Billy Bathgate, the brazen boy who is accepted into the inner circle of the notorious Dutch Schultz gang. Like an urban Tom Sawyer, Billy takes us along on his fateful adventures as he becomes good-luck charm, apprentice, and finally protégé to one of the great murdering gangsters of the Depression-era underworld in New York City. The luminous transformation of fact into fiction that is E. L. Doctorow’s trademark comes to triumphant fruition in Billy Bathgate, a peerless coming-of-age tale and one of Doctorow’s boldest and most beloved bestsellers.
From the Pulitzer Prize–winning author Larry McMurtry comes the 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 stretches of the West into a hellhole known as Crow Town and, finally, into the vast, relentless plains of the Texas frontier.
