{"product_id":"butchers-crossing-isbn-9781590171981","title":"Butcher's Crossing","description":"\u003cb\u003eNow a major motion picture starring Nicolas Cage and directed by Gabe Polsky.\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIn his National Book Award–winning novel \u003ci\u003eAugustus\u003c\/i\u003e, John Williams uncovered the secrets  of ancient Rome. With \u003ci\u003eButcher’s Crossing\u003c\/i\u003e, his fiercely intelligent, beautifully written  western, Williams dismantles the myths of modern America.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e It is the 1870s, and Will  Andrews, fired up by Emerson to seek “an original relation to nature,” drops out of  Harvard and heads west. He washes up in Butcher’s Crossing, a small Kansas town on  the outskirts of nowhere. Butcher’s Crossing is full of restless men looking for  ways to make money and ways to waste it. Before long Andrews strikes up a friendship  with one of them, a man who regales Andrews with tales of immense herds of buffalo,  ready for the taking, hidden away in a beautiful valley deep in the Colorado Rockies.  He convinces Andrews to join in an expedition to track the animals down. The journey  out is grueling, but at the end is a place of paradisal richness. Once there, however,  the three men abandon themselves to an orgy of slaughter, so caught up in killing  buffalo that they lose all sense of time. Winter soon overtakes them: they are snowed  in. Next spring, half-insane with cabin fever, cold, and hunger, they stagger back  to Butcher’s Crossing to find a world as irremediably changed as they have been.\u003cp\u003e\"One of the finest books about the elusive nature of the West ever written...It's  a graceful and brutal story of isolated men gone haywire.\" --\u003ci\u003eTime Out New York\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\"Harsh  and relentless yet muted in tone, \u003ci\u003eButcher's Crossing \u003c\/i\u003epaved the way for Cormac McCarthy.  It was perhaps the first and best revisionist western.\" --\u003ci\u003eThe New York Times Book  Review\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\"One of the finest novels of the West ever to come out of the West.\"--\u003ci\u003eThe  Denver Post\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e“\u003ci\u003eButcher's Crossing \u003c\/i\u003eis perhaps the finest western in literature. John Williams may have published only a few novels, but they were all just about perfect. Although the subject and story is much different than Williams's \u003ci\u003eStoner\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003eButcher's Crossing \u003c\/i\u003eis equally beautiful, heartbreaking, and historically accurate.\" —Jeffrey J, Powell’s City of Books blog\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\"Williams didn't write much compared with some novelists, but everything  he did was exceedingly fine...it's a shame that he's not more often read today...But  it's great that at least two of his novels [\u003ci\u003eStoner, Butcher's Crossing\u003c\/i\u003e] have found  their way back into print.\" --\u003ci\u003eThe Denver Post\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e“Reading John Williams–even to have  done so at the time these novels were written–is an exercise in nostalgia, a nostalgia  found also in writers like Willa Cather, for whom the West represented a lost redoubt  of intellectual dignity...It is tempting to say that Cather's tradition flagged because  the West has changed – it is no longer anybody's bildungsroman–but it is safer to  say that writers as talented and right-minded as John Williams are not naturally  plentiful.” –\u003ci\u003eNew York Sun\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThis story about the hunt of one of the last great buffalo  herds \"becomes a young man's search for the integrity of his own being...The characters  are defined, the events lively, the place, the smells, the sounds right.  And the  prose is superb, a rarity in writing about the west.  More, John Williams.\"--\u003ci\u003eThe  Chicago Tribune\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\"John Williams's unsparing novels express a highly qualified though  resilient optimism about our ability to salvage something of value from life's impossible  conditions.  Along with the necessary isolation of the artist, he conveys the sobering  if startled recognition--perhaps with his own career in mind--of the transitory triumph  of art.\"--\u003ci\u003eTimes Literary Supplement\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e“\u003ci\u003eButcher’s Crossing \u003c\/i\u003edismantles the myth of the west, revealing a horror story about the grinding day to day of just surviving…[a] restrained and gorgeous lyricism…even in its softer moments it doesn’t overdo anything, and the moral criticism is in the precision of the language, the now-famous simple and elegant Williams prose.” —Bret Easton Ellis, \u003ci\u003eThe Guardian\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cb\u003eJohn Williams\u003c\/b\u003e (1922—1994) was born in Texas.  He taught for many years at the University of Denver, where he was head of the creative writing program.  Williams won the 1973 National Book Award in fiction for \u003ci\u003eAugustus\u003c\/i\u003e.  His novel \u003ci\u003eStoner\u003c\/i\u003e is also published as an NYRB Classic.  \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eMichelle Latiolais\u003c\/b\u003e is an associate professor of English at the UC Irvine. Her novel, \u003ci\u003eEven Now\u003c\/i\u003e, won a Gold Medal from the Commonwealth Club of California. She has recently published fiction and essays in \u003ci\u003eThe Antioch Review, Santa Monica Review,\u003c\/i\u003e and \u003ci\u003eZYZZYVA\u003c\/i\u003e.","brand":"NYRB Classics","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46299711471845,"sku":"NP9781590171981","price":17.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9781590171981.jpg?v=1767723224","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/products\/butchers-crossing-isbn-9781590171981","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}