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. 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.
"A forceful, credible story of cowardice and evil."
"-The Washington Post"
"We are caught up with these people as real human beings."
"-Chicago Sun-Times
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"Dramatic and exciting."
-"The New York Times
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"Terse and powerful."
"-Newsweek"
"A taut, bloodthirsty read."
"-The Times Literary Supplement"
"A superb piece of fiction."
"-The New Republic"

William Mack just wanted peace. He followed trouble back to his home town, Dalston, Missouri, and took care of it. There, he planned to settle with his brother, Joshua, and his uncle, Frank. He was to be married to Mira. Pete Sterns rode in to town and changed all of that. Things around Dalston will never be the same.

The story of Jack Crabbe, raised by both a white man and a Cheyenne chief. As a Cheyenne, Jack ate dog, had four wives and saw his people butchered by General Custer's soldiers. As a white man, he participated in the slaughter of the buffalo and tangled with Wyatt Earp.

Louis L'Amour is recognized the world over as one of the most prolific and popular American authors. While every one of his 89 novels is still in print, a lesser known fact is that L'Amour is also one of the all-time bestselling authors of short fiction. This volume features 35 action-packed frontier stories.

USA Today Bestseller! One of Refinery29's Best Reads of September In this novel authorized by the Little House Heritage Trust, Sarah Miller vividly recreates the beauty, hardship, and joys of the frontier in a dazzling work of historical fiction, a captivating story that illuminates one courageous, resilient, and loving pioneer woman as never before-Caroline Ingalls, "Ma" in Laura Ingalls Wilder's beloved Little House books. In the frigid days of February, 1870, Caroline Ingalls and her family leave the familiar comforts of the Big Woods of Wisconsin and the warm bosom of her family, for a new life in Kansas Indian Territory. Packing what they can carry in their wagon, Caroline, her husband Charles, and their little girls, Mary and Laura, head west to settle in a beautiful, unpredictable land full of promise and peril. The pioneer life is a hard one, especially for a pregnant woman with no friends or kin to turn to for comfort or help. The burden of work must be shouldered alone, sickness tended without the aid of doctors, and babies birthed without the accustomed hands of mothers or sisters. But Caroline's new world is also full of tender joys. In adapting to this strange new place and transforming a rough log house built by Charles' hands into a home, Caroline must draw on untapped wells of strength she does not know she possesses. For more than eighty years, generations of readers have been enchanted by the adventures of the American frontier's most famous child, Laura Ingalls Wilder, in the Little House books. Now, that familiar story is retold in this captivating tale of family, fidelity, hardship, love, and survival that vividly reimagines our past.

A taut, thrilling adventure story about buried treasure, a manhunt, and a woman determined to make a new life for herself in the old west.
It's the 19th century on the GulfCoast, a time of opportunity and lawlessness. After escaping the Texas brothel where she'd been a virtual prisoner, Lucinda Carter heads for Middle Bayou to meet her lover, who has a plan to make them both rich, chasing rumors of a pirate's buried treasure.
Meanwhile Nate Cannon, a young Texas policeman with a pure heart and a strong sense of justice, is on the hunt for a ruthless killer named McGill who has claimed the lives of men, women, and even children across the frontier. Who--if anyone--will survive when their paths finally cross?
As Lucinda and Nate's stories converge, guns are drawn, debts are paid, and Kathleen Kent delivers an unforgettable portrait of a woman who will stop at nothing to make a new life for herself.

The Western, with its stoic cowboys and quickhanded gunslingers, is an instantly recognizable American genre that has achieved worldwide success. Cultures around the world have embraced but also adapted and critiqued the Western as part of their own national literatures, reinterpreting and expanding the genre in curious ways. Canadian Westerns are almost always in conversation with their American cousins, influenced by their tropes and traditions, responding to their politics, and repurposing their structures to create a national literary tradition. The American Western in Canadian Literature examines over a century of the development of the Canadian Western as it responds to the American Western, to evolving literary trends, and to regional, national, and international change. Beginning with Indigenous perspectives on the genre, it moves from early manifestations of the Western in Christian narratives of personal and national growth, and its controversial pulp-fictional popularity in the 1940s, to its postmodern and contemporary critiques, pushing the boundary of the Western to include Northerns, Northwesterns, and post-Westerns in literature, film, and wider cultural imagery. The American Western in Canadian Literature is more than a simple history. It uses genre theory to comment on historical perspectives on nation and region. It includes overviews of Indigenous and settler-colonial critiques of the Western, challenging persistent attitudes to Indigenous people and their traditional territories that are endemic to the genre. It illuminates the way that the Canadian Western enshrines, hagiographies, and ultimately desacralizes aspects of Canadian life, from car culture to extractive industries to assumptions about a Canadian moral high ground. This is a comprehensive, highly readable, and fascinating study of an underexamined genre.

Multiple-award-winning author Rick Riordan brings back smart-mouthed Texas P.I. Tres Navarre for his most dangerous case yet. If you think the academic world is deadly dull, you're half right....

When a controversial English professor is found shot to death, Tres Navarre — P.I. and Ph.D. — is the only local academic crazy enough to accept the emergency opening at the University of Texas at San Antonio. Police assure him they already have a suspect, so while they wrap up the open-and-shut case, all Tres has to do is teach three classes, grade on a curve ... and walk in a dead man's shoes.

It should be an easy assignment — but one thing Tres doesn't do is easy. When the evidence in the case starts looking a little too perfect, when the killing doesn't stop, Tres takes on some extracurricular research into the heart of an assassin — and lands in a high-stakes game of gangster honor on the darkest streets of San Antonio's West Side....

This supplement for Dracula's America: Shadows of the West contains a host of new rules and material and offers something for every player.

- Two New Factions: The Forsaken, ragged survivors of the 7th Cavalry tormented by a bestial curse, and the Shadow Dragon Tong, crimelords with an agenda as mysterious as the powers wielded by their enforcers.

- The Hunting Grounds: Scenarios and encounters that focus on this mythical realm and the power and threats found within it.

- Territory: Build and develop your headquarters, and exploit the benefits it offers, but beware your enemies taking the fight to your home turf.

- Outlaws, Mercenaries and Bounty Hunters: New campaign options, allowing you to turn to a life of crime, bring in wanted fugitives, or sell your gun to the highest bidder.

- New Monsters: The denizens of the Hunting Grounds, in all their terrifying glory.

- New Hired Guns: There's all kinds of folk willing to sell their skills, and these new Hired Guns offer a range of tactical options... if you can afford them.

- New Gear: Bring a Gatling Gun to a knife fight, or find out why you were always warned about misusing brimstone chalk and vials of ectoplasm.

- New Skills: Riding and Leadership skills give you new combat options and help your posse stay in the fight.

Winner of the 2012 Story Prize
Recipient of the 2012 American Academy of Arts and Letters Rosenthal Foundation Award
A National Book Foundation "5 Under 35" fiction writer of 2012
Like the work of Cormac McCarthy, Denis Johnson, Richard Ford, and Annie Proulx, "Battleborn "represents a near-perfect confluence of sensibility and setting, and the introduction of an exceptionally powerful and original literary voice. In each of these ten unforgettable stories, Claire Vaye Watkins writes her way fearlessly into the mythology of the American West, utterly reimagining it. Her characters orbit around the region's vast spaces, winning redemption despite - and often because of - the hardship and violence they endure. The arrival of a foreigner transforms the exchange of eroticism and emotion at a prostitution ranch. A prospecting hermit discovers the limits of his rugged individualism when he tries to rescue an abused teenager. Decades after she led her best friend into a degrading encounter in a Vegas hotel room, a woman feels the aftershock. Most bravely of all, Watkins takes on - and reinvents - her own troubled legacy in a story that emerges from the mayhem and destruction of Helter Skelter. Arcing from the sweeping and sublime to the minute and personal, from Gold Rush to ghost town to desert to brothel, the collection echoes not only in its title but also in its fierce, undefeated spirit the motto of her home state.

When it comes to boiling up a pot of coffee or stirring up a pot of stew, Old Laramie's about as good a man as you're going to find. But other than cooking three squares a day for the cowpunchers over at the Lazy G ranch, Laramie's not good for much. He's about as heroic as Walter Brennan on a bender.
But Laramie's luck--and life--are about to take an amazing turn. Quite by accident, he somehow manages to save a family of Mexicans from bandits, and as a token of their gratitude they give him The Magic Quirt--a horsewhip that he's told will turn him into a new man.
The transformation is indeed magical. Suddenly Laramie is performing feats of ingenuity and courage that would make even the Lone Ranger proud. But magic is a funny thing--and as Laramie's about to discover, sometimes it's all an illusion.
L. Ron Hubbard wrote of his childhood: "The weather of Montana is, of course, brutal. The country is immense and swallows up men rather easily, hence they have to live bigger than life to survive. There were still Indians around living in forlorn and isolated tepees. Notable among them was Old Tom, a full-fledged Blackfoot medicine man." Hubbard and Old Tom became blood brothers, and the medicine man shared with him the kind of lore that make stories like The Magic Quirt as compelling as they are.
Also includes the Western adventures, Vengeance Is Mine , the story of a young man who sets out to avenge his father's death only to commit an act beyond redemption, and Stacked Bullets, in which a game of chance is fixed, a whole town is cheated, and nothing but a stack of bullets can make things right.
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"Pure entertainment from first page to last with that L. Ron Hubbard touch giving this tale an enduring reading engagement from beginning to end."" --Midwest Book Review