Montana 1948


Larry Watson - 1993
    It is a tale of love and courage, of power abused, and of the terrible choice between family loyalty and justice.

American Tabloid


James Ellroy - 1995
    Edgar Hoover, Howard Hughes, Jimmy Hoffa, Cuban political exiles, and various loose cannons conspire in a covert anarchy...Where the right drugs, the right amount of cash, the right murder, buys a moment of a man's loyalty...Where three renegade law-enforcement officers—a former L.A. cop and two FBI agents—are shaping events with the virulence of their greed and hatred, riding full-blast shotgun into history....James Ellroy's trademark nothing-spared rendering of reality, blistering language, and relentless narrative pace are here in electrifying abundance, put to work in a novel as shocking and daring as anything he's written: a secret history that zeroes in on a time still shrouded in secrets and blows it wide open.Chosen by Time magazine as one of the ten best books of the year."Hard-bitten ... ingenious ... Ellroy segues into political intrigue without missing a beat." —The New York Times"Vastly entertaining." —Los Angeles Times"One hellishly exciting ride." —Detroit Free Press"A supremely controlled work of art." —The New York Times Book Review

Cuba Libre


Elmore Leonard - 1998
    (The classics Hombre, Valdez is Coming, and 3:10 to Yuma were just a few of his notable works.) With his extraordinary Cuba Libre, Leonard ingeniously combines all of his many talents and delivers a historical adventure/caper/western/noir like none other. The creator of U.S. Marshal Raylan Givens, star of Raylan, Pronto, Riding the Rap, and TV’s Justified, spins a gloriously exciting yarn about an American horse wrangler who escapes a date with a Cuban firing squad to join forces with a powerful sugar baron’s lady looking to make waves and score big in and around Spanish-American War-torn Havana in 1898. Everything you love about Leonard’s fiction—and more—is evident in Cuba Libre.

Fierce Invalids Home from Hot Climates


Tom Robbins - 2000
    . . Robbins takes readers on a wild, delightful ride. . . . A delight from beginning to end."--Buffalo NewsSwitters is a contradiction for all seasons: an anarchist who works for the government; a pacifist who carries a gun; a vegetarian who sops up ham gravy; a cyberwhiz who hates computers; a man who, though obsessed with the preservation of innocence, is aching to deflower his high-school-age stepsister (only to become equally enamored of a nun ten years his senior). Yet there is nothing remotely wishy-washy about Switters. He doesn't merely pack a pistol. He is a pistol. And as we dog Switters's strangely elevated heels across four continents, in and out of love and danger, discovering in the process the "true" Third Secret of Fatima, we experience Tom Robbins--that fearless storyteller, spiritual renegade, and verbal break dancer--at the top of his game. On one level this is a fast-paced CIA adventure story with comic overtones; on another it's a serious novel of ideas that brings the Big Picture into unexpected focus; but perhaps more than anything else, Fierce Invalids is a sexy celebration of language and life.Praise for Fierce Invalids Home From Hot Climates"Superb."--New York Post"Dangerous? Wicked? Forbidden? You bet. . . . Pour yourself a bowl of chips and dig in."--Daily News, New York "Robbins is a great writer . . . and definitely a provocative rascal."--The Tennessean"Whoever said truth is stranger than fiction never read a Tom Robbins novel. . . Clever, creative, and witty, Robbins tosses off impassioned observations like handfuls of flower petals."-- San Diego Union-Tribune

China Men


Maxine Hong Kingston - 1980
    Here's a storyteller's tale of what they endured in a strange new land.

Varina


Charles Frazier - 2018
    He instead pursues a career in politics and is eventually appointed president of the Confederacy, placing Varina at the white-hot center of one of the darkest moments in American history—culpable regardless of her intentions. The Confederacy falling, her marriage in tatters, and the country divided, Varina and her children escape Richmond and travel south on their own, now fugitives with “bounties on their heads, an entire nation in pursuit.” Intimate in its detailed observations of one woman’s tragic life and epic in its scope and power, Varina is a novel of an American war and its aftermath. Ultimately, the book is a portrait of a woman who comes to realize that complicity carries consequences.

Bright Shiny Morning


James Frey - 2008
    A dazzling tour de force, Bright Shiny Morning illuminates the joys, horrors, and unexpected fortunes of life and death in Los Angeles.

Welcome to Hard Times


E.L. Doctorow - 1960
    To this town there comes one day one of the reckless sociopaths who wander the West to kill and rape and pillage. By the time he is through and has ridden off, Hard Times is a smoking ruin. The de facto mayor, Blue, takes in two survivors of the carnage–a boy, Jimmy, and a prostitute, Molly, who has suffered unspeakably–and makes them his provisional family. Blue begins to rebuild Hard Times, welcoming new settlers, while Molly waits with vengeance in her heart for the return of the outlaw. Here is E. L. Doctorow’s debut novel, a searing allegory of frontier life that sets the stage for his subsequent classics.

Not Without My Daughter


Betty Mahmoody - 1987
    To her horror, she found herself and her four-year-old daughter, Mahtob, virtual prisoners of a man rededicated to his Shiite Moslem faith, in a land where women are near-slaves and Americans despised. Their only hope for escape lay in a dangerous underground that would not take her child.

The Voyage of the Narwhal


Andrea Barrett - 1998
    Through the eyes of the ship's scholar-naturalist, Erasmus Darwin Wells, we encounter the Narwhal's crew, its commander, and the far-north culture of the Esquimaux. In counterpoint, we meet the women left behind in Philadelphia, explorers only in imagination. Together, those who travel and those who stay weave a web of myth and mystery, finally discovering what they had not sought, the secrets of their own hearts.

The House of the Seven Gables


Nathaniel Hawthorne - 1851
    Written shortly after The Scarlet Letter, The House of the Seven Gables re-addresses the theme of human guilt in a style remarkable in both its descriptive virtuosity and its truly modern mix of fantasy and realism.

Nobody's Angel


Thomas McGuane - 1982
    His grandfather wants to run away to act in movies, his sister wants to burn the house down, and his new stallion is bent on killing him: all of them urgently require attention. But increasingly Patrick himself is spiraling out of control, into that region of romantic misadventure and vanishing possibilities that is Thomas McGuane's Montana. Nowhere has McGuane mapped that territory more precisely -- or with such tenderhearted lunacy -- than in Nobody's Angel, a novel that places him in a genre of his own.

Deadwood


Pete Dexter - 1986
    Bill, aging and sick but still able to best any man in a fair gunfight, just wants to be left alone to drink and play cards. But in this town of played-out miners, bounty hunters, upstairs girls, Chinese immigrants, and various other entrepeneurs and miscreants, he finds himself pursued by a vicious sheriff, a perverse whore man bent on revenge, and a besotted Calamity Jane. Fueled by liquor, sex, and violence, this is the real wild west, unlike anything portrayed in the dime novels that first told its story.

The Hunters


James Salter - 1956
    Four decades later, it is clear that he also fashioned the most enduring fiction ever about aerial warfare.Captain Cleve Connell arrives in Korea with a single goal: to become an ace, one of that elite fraternity of jet pilots who have downed five MIGs. But as his fellow airmen rack up kill after kill--sometimes under dubious circumstances--Cleve's luck runs bad. Other pilots question his guts. Cleve comes to question himself. And then in one icy instant 40,000 feet above the Yalu River, his luck changes forever. Filled with courage and despair, eerie beauty and corrosive rivalry, The Hunters is a landmark in the literature of war.

Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter


Seth Grahame-Smith - 2010
    Moonlight falls through the dense woods that surround a one-room cabin, where a nine-year-old Abraham Lincoln kneels at his suffering mother's bedside. She's been stricken with something the old-timers call "Milk Sickness.""My baby boy..." she whispers before dying.Only later will the grieving Abe learn that his mother's fatal affliction was actually the work of a vampire.When the truth becomes known to young Lincoln, he writes in his journal, "henceforth my life shall be one of rigorous study and devotion. I shall become a master of mind and body. And this mastery shall have but one purpose..." Gifted with his legendary height, strength, and skill with an ax, Abe sets out on a path of vengeance that will lead him all the way to the White House.While Abraham Lincoln is widely lauded for saving a Union and freeing millions of slaves, his valiant fight against the forces of the undead has remained in the shadows for hundreds of years. That is, until Seth Grahame-Smith stumbled upon The Secret Journal of Abraham Lincoln, and became the first living person to lay eyes on it in more than 140 years.Using the journal as his guide and writing in the grand biographical style of Doris Kearns Goodwin and David McCullough, Seth has reconstructed the true life story of our greatest president for the first time-all while revealing the hidden history behind the Civil War and uncovering the role vampires played in the birth, growth, and near-death of our nation.