Literary Fiction Western

Cripple Creek, Colorado, is the most infamous sinkhole of vice and violence in the Rockies. The town's steamy bordello row and gambling halls beckon to Brad Medford, who is set on tasting all the pleasures a young man can find. He sets out across the long miles to reach Cripple Creek and prove himself a man, but misfortune takes a hand when Brad's path crosses that of a renowned gunfighter. It turns out Brad's first meal in Cripple Creek may be his last.

When Andrew Apperley visits his brother David in the East, he brings along an unexpected companion. Andrew's giant wolf dog, Comanche, is so wild that he has to be chained up for the safety of others. However, when the Apperley brothers come across a man drowning in the East River, Comanche breaks loose from his chains and swims to the man's rescue.

Peter, a disgraced meteorologist and chronic wanderer, has traveled the country for years in his Winnebago, in search of the only thing that gives his life meaning. He's just arrived in the middle of nowhere-Hokie, Kansas-for the same purpose, but when he meets a waitress named Melanie, another sufferer, he's faced not only with his first real human contact in years, but perhaps someone who can save him.

Wild mustangs, ghosts on the ranch, gun-toting outlaws and trailblazing cowboys roam the pages of this collection of 8 classic stories about the American frontier. Travel down "The Road to Hell" with a mysterious ranch builder, face down the "Yellow Devil" mountain lion, travel "Where the Wind Blows Free," and join in on a herd of other adventures that will keep you reading until long after high noon.

Two decades after the Civil War, Josephine Marcus, the teenage daughter of Jewish immigrants, is lured west with the promise of marriage to Johnny Behan, one of Arizona's famous lawmen. She leaves her San Francisco home to join Behan in Tombstone, Arizona, a magnet for miners (and outlaws) attracted by the silver boom. Though united by the glint of metal, Tombstone is plagued by divided loyalties: between Confederates and Unionists, Lincoln Republicans and Democrats.

Small-town boys Caleb and Jake Boyd spend their days splitting logs and barely scraping by in the badlands of New Mexico. Caleb, a decorated war hero, wants to put his fighting days behind him, find a decent job, and start a quiet life with his new fiancée. But Jake is always dreaming bigger than he should, and when he stumbles across a large crop of marijuana hidden in the wilderness, he thinks he has finally hit the jackpot.

Southwest Arizona, a century ago: an uneasy truce exists between the remote frontier community of Picture City and the neighboring Apaches. That delicate peace is shredded when the bodies of two white men are found hideously mutilated. The angry townspeople are certain the “savages” have broken the treaty, but Billjohn Finley, the local Indian agent, fears that darker, more unholy forces may be at work. There’s a tall, dark stranger in town, who rode in wearing the dead men’s clothes. A stranger who may not be entirely human.

In this panoramic tale of manifest destiny, Stephen Moran comes of age with the young country that he crosses on the Union Pacific, just as the railroad unites the continent. Propelled westward from his Brooklyn neighborhood and the killing fields of the Civil War to the Battle of Little Big Horn, he befriends Walt Whitman, becomes a bugler on President Lincoln's funeral train, apprentices with frontier photographer William Henry Jackson, and stalks General George Custer.

The steady tick of an aged Regulator wall clock and the squeak of an overhead fan turning slowly are soft but insistent, counting down the night, while the high desert thrums like a half-remembered Victrola song. The sounds are below the consciousness of Winchell Dear, an old-time gambler, a Texas poker player on the southern circuit, as he waits for something...something vague that his life of chance tells him is evil and moving his way.

Eli Singer, a rancher and poet in remote Eastern Montana, sees his life upended when a long-buried corpse - which turns out to be a murder victim from Eli's childhood - erodes out of a hillside on his property. This discovery forces Eli to turn inward to revisit the tragic events in his past that led to a life-changing moment of violence, while at the same time he must reach outside himself toward Chloe, a literary agent from New York whom he is falling in love with.

"Folks. This here is the story of the Loop Garoo Kid. A cowboy so bad he made a working posse of spells phone in sick. A bullwhacker so unfeeling he left the print of winged mice on hides of crawling women. A desperado so onery he made the Pope cry and the most powerful of cattlemen shed his head to the Executioner's swine." And so begins the HooDoo Western by Ishmael Reed, author of Mumbo Jumbo and one of America's most innovative and celebrated writers. Reed demolishes white American history and folklore as well as Christian myth in this masterful satire of contemporary American life.

USA Today best-selling author Ralph Cotton pens gun-blazing tales evoking the glory days of the Old West. In City of Bad Men, Lawrence “Fast Larry” Shaw wants nothing more than peace and quiet after miraculously surviving a gunshot wound to the head. But his hopes for tranquility don’t last long. A powerful businessman needs help defending his mining operation from the likes of the Cut-Jaws Gang, and he thinks Larry is just the man for the job.

Dusty Richards bases his scores of Western novels on extensive research on the Old West. With an unflinchingview of the violence and cruelty that marked both sides of the Indian conflicts, he spins the riveting tale of Apachescout Deuces. Unjustly condemned for murder, he escapes his guard and disappears into the wilderness. Now hot on his trail is a U.S. Marshal determined to catch Deuces, no matter what the cost.

A motley crew, banished from a Western town, find strength, and weakness, in each other.

Reporter Lester Booker joins legendary gunfighter Rance March on the trail of a dangerous outlaw to learn how the West was really won.

Charlie Roy and pale, skinny Sir Arthur, an English gentleman, arrive at the Crown B ranch, north of Cheyenne, which is owned by the sir's sister, Elizabeth, who was widowed just the past winter and left with a ranch that lost nearly all its beef stock from the brutal '86-'87 winter freeze. Additionally, Elizabeth's dead husband's former partner, Justin Harper, is hell-bent on taking over her ranch. But what Harper and his boys don't figure on is interference by the likes of Charlie and the fierceness of the Sir.

At the heart of this exciting debut novel, set in Arizona and Idaho in the mid-1970s, is 15-year-old Loretta, who slips out of her bedroom every evening to meet her so-called gentile boyfriend. Her strict Mormon parents catch her returning one night, and promptly marry her off to Dean Harder, a devout yet materialistic fundamentalist who already has a wife and a brood of kids. The Harders relocate to his native Idaho, where Dean's teenage nephew Jason falls hard for Loretta.

Racism can linger in the strangest of places. Sometimes, even within yourself. For Clara Lacroix, the past was the place she chose to dwell. That's where her memories of Boone, and the life they shared, resided. But for Joe Black Hawk, the past was a painful mix of a fading heritage he didn't want to lose, and a string of mistakes he'd just as soon forget.

There's no taming Billy Blanchard. He's cut from the same rough cloth as his father, Jacob, the man who built the town of Black Horse Creek from nothing. Jacob takes pride in Billy's lawless, wild ways. But when the boy returns home with a stolen horse, having just killed a US Marshal, Jacob knows trouble will be coming. Called in on special assignment, enigmatic former deputy marshal Grayson is asked to find Billy. The marshals would prefer to have him brought in alive. But Grayson knows Billy.

Hard Times is the name of a town in the barren hills of the Dakota Territory. 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.