As this final volume of "The Berrybender Narratives" opens, Tasmin and her family are under irksome, though comfortable, arrest in Mexican Santa Fe. Her father, the eccentric Lord Berrybender, is planning to head for Texas with his whole family and his retainers. Tasmin, who would once have followed her husband, Jim Snow, anywhere, is no longer even sure she likes him, or knows where to go to next.

In the meantime, Jim Snow, accompanied by Kit Carson, journeys to New Orleans, where he meets up with a muscular black giant named Juppy in whose company they make their way back to Santa Fe. But even they are unable to prevent the Mexicans from carrying the Berrybender family on a long and terrible journey across the desert to Vera Cruz.

Starving, dying of thirst, and in constant, bloody battle with slavers pursuing them, the Berrybenders finally make their way to civilization, where Jim Snow has to choose between Tasmin and the great American plains, on which he has lived all his life in freedom, and where, after all her adventures, Tasmin must finally decide where her future lies.

With a cast of characters that includes almost every major real-life figure of the West, "Folly and Glory" is a novel that represents the culmination of a great and unique four-volume saga of the early days of the West; it is one of Larry McMurtry's finest achievements.

The Pulitzer Prize­–winning American classic of the American West that follows two aging Texas Rangers embarking on one last adventure. An epic of the frontier, Lonesome Dove is the grandest novel ever written about the last defiant wilderness of America.

Journey to the dusty little Texas town of Lonesome Dove and meet an unforgettable assortment of heroes and outlaws, whores and ladies, Indians and settlers.

Richly authentic, beautifully written, always dramatic, Lonesome Dove is a book to make us laugh, weep, dream, and remember.

Dead Man's Walk is the first, extraordinary book in the epic Lonesome Dove tetralogy, in which Larry McMurtry breathed new life into the vanished American West and created two of the most memorable heroes in contemporary fiction: Augustus McCrae and Woodrow Call.

As young Texas Rangers, Gus and Call have much to learn about survival in a land fraught with perils: not only the blazing heat and raging tornadoes, roiling rivers and merciless Indians but also the deadly whims of soldiers. On their first expeditions--led by incompetent officers and accompanied by the robust, dauntless whore known as the Great Western--they will face death at the hands of the cunning Comanche war chief Buffalo Hump and the silent Apache Gomez. They will be astonished by the Mexican army. And Gus will meet the love of his life.

The Last Picture Show (1966) is both a rambunctious coming-of-age story and an elegy to a forlorn Texas town trying to keep its one movie house alive. Adapted into the Oscar-winning film, this masterpiece immortalizes the lives of the hardscrabble residents who are threatened by the inexorable forces of the modern world.

The second book of Larry McMurtry's Lonesome Dove tetralogy, Comache Moon takes us once again into the world of the American West.

Texas Rangers August McCrae and Woodrow Call, now in their middle years, continue to deal with the ever-increasing tensions of adult life -- Gus with his great love, Clara Forsythe, and Call with Maggie Tilton, the young whore who loves him. Two proud but very different men, they enlist with the Ranger troop in pursuit of Buffalo Hump, the great Comanche war chief; Kicking Wolf, the celebrated Comanche horse thief; and a deadly Mexican bandit king with a penchant for torture. Assisting the Rangers in their wild chase is the renowned Kickapoo tracker, Famous Shoes.

Comanche Moon closes the twenty-year gap between Dead Man's Walk and Lonesome Dove, following beloved heroes Gus and Call and their comrades in arms -- Deets, Jake Spoon, and Pea Eye Parker -- in their bitter struggle to protect the advancing West frontier against the defiant Comanches, courageously determined to defend their territory and their way of life.

The final book of Larry McMurtry's Lonesome Dove tetralogy is an exhilarating tale of legend and heroism. 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 streches of the West into a hellhole known as Crow Town and, finally, into the vast, relentless plains of the Texas frontier.

In this acclaimed novel that inspired the Academy Award-winning motion picture, Larry McMurtry created two unforgettable characters who won the hearts of readers and moviegoers everywhere: Aurora Greenway and her daughter Emma.

Aurora is the kind of woman who makes the whole world orbit around her, including a string of devoted suitors. Widowed and overprotective of her daughter, Aurora adapts at her own pace until life sends two enormous challenges her way: Emma's hasty marriage and subsequent battle with cancer. Terms of Endearment is the Oscar-winning story of a memorable mother and her feisty daughter and their struggle to find the courage and humor to live through life's hazards -- and to love each other as never before.

Annie Proulx has written some of the most original and brilliant short stories in contemporary literature, and for many readers and reviewers, "Brokeback Mountain" is her masterpiece.

"Brokeback Mountain" was originally published in "The New Yorker." It won the National Magazine Award. It also won an O. Henry Prize. Included in this volume is Annie Proulx's haunting story about the difficult, dangerous love affair between a ranch hand and a rodeo cowboy. Also included is the celebrated screenplay for the major motion picture "Brokeback Mountain," written by Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana. All three writers have contributed essays on the process of adapting this critically acclaimed story for film.

A sweeping four-part epic of the American West that could only come from the boundless skill and imagination of Pulitzer Prize- winning author Larry McMurtry.
Over a career that spans fifty years, Larry McMurtry has been celebrated as "one of America's great storytellers" ("The Wall Street Journal") and a writer who "stands among our best not only because of his uncanny ability to compress a cogent narrative arc but also because his eye for the moving detail is infallible" ("Los Angeles Times"). In "The Berrybender Narratives, "now published in a single volume for the first time, the author of "Lonesome Dove "delivers the unforgettable story of an idiosyncratic pioneer family and a truly unique view of the American West, reminding us again that his writing "has the power to clutch the heart and also to exhilarate" ("The New Yorker").
In 1830, the Berrybender family--British, aristocratic, and fiercely out of place--abandons their home in England to embark on a journey through the American West just as the frontier is beginning to open up. Accompanied by a large and varied collection of retainers, Lord and Lady Berrybender intend to travel up the Missouri and settle in Texas, hoping to broaden the perspectives of their children, including Tasmin, a young woman of grit, beauty, and cunning. But when Tasmin's fast-developing relationship with Jim Snow, a frontiersman and ferocious Indian fighter, begins to dictate the family's course, they move further into the expansive and hostile wilderness and into the path of Indians, pioneers, mountain men, and explorers. As Lord Berrybender's health falters, and the rest of the family goes to pieces around him, Tasmin finds herself taking command of their collective fate and is finally forced to decide where her future lies.
Full of real and fascinating characters, famous shoot-outs, adventure, humor, love, and loss, "The Berrybender Narratives "is an epic of the American West during its period of transformation, a landscape that nobody understands better than Larry McMurtry.

A stunning literary debut, Horseman, Pass By (1961) exhibits the "full-blooded Western genius" (Publishers Weekly) that would come to define McMurtry's incomparable sensibility. In the dusty north Texas town of Thalia, young Lonnie Bannon quietly endures the pangs of maturity as a persistent rivalry between his grandfather and step-uncle, Hud, festers, and a deadly disease spreads among their cattle like wildfire.

With Texasville, Larry McMurtry returns to the unforgettable Texas town and characters of one of his best-loved books, The Last Picture Show. This is a Texas-sized story brimming with home truths of the heart, and men and women we recognize, believe in, and care about deeply. Set in the post-oil-boom 1980s, Texasville brings us up to date with Duane, who's got an adoring dog, a sassy wife, a twelve-million-dollar debt, and a hot tub by the pool; Jacy, who's finished playing "Jungla" in Italian movies and who's returned to Thalia; and Sonny -- Duane's teenage rival for Jacy's affections -- who owns the car wash, the Kwik-Sackstore, and the video arcade.

One of Larry McMurtry's funniest and most touching contemporary novels.

In Leaving Cheyenne (1963), which anticipates Lonesome Dove more than any other early novel, the stark realities of the American West play out in a mesmerizing love triangle. Stubborn rancher Gideon Fry, resilient Molly Taylor, and awkward ranch hand Johnny McCloud struggle with love and jealousy as the years pass.

Forty years ago, Larry McMurtry journeyed from the sprawling ranches of his early work to the provocative Sunset Strip, creating a Hollywood fable that is both immediate and relevant in today's dynamic cultural climate. One would never guess that Jill Peel is still on the verge of stardom. Jill won an Oscar shortly after her fresh-faced arrival in 1950s Hollywood, then for the next twenty years batted away every Tinseltown producer who tried to hire her and get her into bed. Now middle-aged, she's determined to create more movie magic by directing a cast of raunchy eccentrics, including Joe Percy, an aging womanizing screenwriter, and ex-football player Owen Oarson, eager to sleep his way to leading-man stardom. Teeming with biting humor and intriguing characters that mirror the scandals of modern-day Hollywood, Somebody's Darling is a timeless story about a fiercely capable woman who dares to challenge the realities of a deceptively seductive Babel.

Before embarking on what would become one of the most prominent writing careers in American literature, spanning decades and indelibly shaping the nation's perception of the West, Larry McMurtry knew what it meant to come from Texas. Originally published in 1968, In a Narrow Grave is the Pulitzer Prize-winning author's homage to the past and present of the Lone Star State, where he grew up a precociously observant hand on his father's ranch. From literature to rodeos, small-town folk to big city intellectuals, McMurtry explores all the singular elements that define his land and community, revealing the surprising and particular challenges in the "dying . . . rural, pastoral way of life." "The gold standard for understanding Houston's brash rootlessness and civic insecurities" (Douglas Brinkley, New York Times Book Review), In a Narrow Grave offers a timeless portrait of the vividly human, complex, full-blooded Texan.

In this "comically subversive work of fiction" (Joyce Carol Oates, New York Review of Books), Larry McMurtry chronicles the closing of the American frontier through the travails of two of its most immortal figures, Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday. Tracing their legendary friendship from the settlement of Long Grass, Texas, to Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show in Denver, and finally to Tombstone, Arizona, The Last Kind Words Saloon finds Wyatt and Doc living out the last days of a cowboy lifestyle that is already passing into history. In his stark and peerless prose McMurtry writes of the myths and men that live on even as the storied West that forged them disappears. Hailed by critics and embraced by readers, The Last Kind Words Saloon celebrates the genius of one of our most original American writers.

"One thing I've always liked about Hollywood is its zip, or speed. The whole industry depends to some extent on talent spotting. The hundreds of agents, studio executives, and producers who roam the streets of the city of Los Angeles let very little in the way of talent slip by."
In this final installment of the memoir trilogy that includes "Books "and "Literary Life," Larry McMurtry, "the master of the show-stopping anecdote" ("O: The Oprah Magazine") turns his own keenly observing eye to his rollercoaster romance with Hollywood. As both the creator of numerous works successfully adapted by others for film and television ("Terms of Endearment," "Lonesome Dove," and the Emmy-nominated "The Murder of Mary Phagan") and the author of screenplays including "The Last Picture Show "(with Peter Bogdanovich), "Streets of Laredo," and the Oscar-winning "Brokeback Mountain "(both with longtime writing partner Diana Ossana), McMurtry has seen all the triumphs and frustrations that Tinseltown has to offer a writer, and he recounts them in a voice unfettered by sentiment and yet tinged with his characteristic wry humor.
Beginning with his sudden entree into the world of film as the author of "Horseman, Pass By"--adapted into the Paul Newman-starring "Hud "in 1963--McMurtry regales readers with anecdotes that find him holding hands with Cybill Shepherd, watching Jennifer Garner's audition tape, and taking lunch at Chasen's again and again. McMurtry fans and Hollywood hopefuls alike will find much to cherish in these pages, as McMurtry illuminates life behind the scenes in America's dream factory.

If you had to give America a voice, it’s been said more than once, that voice would be Willie Nelson’s. For more than fifty years, he’s taken the stuff of his life—the good and the bad—and made from it a body of work that has become a permanent part of our musical heritage and kept us company through the good and the bad of our own lives. So it’s fitting, and cause for celebration, that he has finally set down in his own words a book that does justice to his great gifts as a storyteller. In The Facts of Life, Willie Nelson reflects on what has mattered to him in life and what hasn’t. He also tells some great dirty jokes. The result is a book as wise and hilarious as its author.

From Pulitzer Prize-winning author Larry McMurtry comes the first in a four-volume epic journey through the early American frontier, featuring the Berrybender family, English nobility adrift in the American West in the 1830s.It is 1830, and the Berrybender family--rich, aristocratic, English, and hopelessly out of place--is on its way up the Missouri River to see the untamed West as it begins to open up. Lord and Lady Berrybender have abandoned their home in England to broaden the horizons for themselves and their three children. With irascible determination--and a great deal of outright chaos--the party experiences both the awesome majesty and brutal savagery of the unexplored land, from buffalo stampedes and natural disasters to Indian raids and encounters with frontiersmen and trappers, explorers, pioneers, and one part-time preacher known as "the Sin Killer." Sin Killer, the strong, silent Westerner, captures the heart of the strong-willed, beautiful Berrybender daughter, Tasmin. But their fast developing relationship can only bring more trouble for the Berrybender's. Packed with breathtaking adventure, charming romance, and a sense of humor stretching clear over the horizon, Sin Killer is a truly unique view of the West that could only come from the boundless skill and imagination of Larry McMurtry.

Larry McMurtry's Moving On, his epic first novel in the acclaimed Houston series, has long been considered a defining tale of "monumental honesty" worthy of great attention (New York Times). Preceding Terms of Endearment by five years, it is essential reading for anyone who appreciates the inherent genius of McMurtry's late twentieth-century fiction. Moving On centers on the life of Patsy Carpenter, one of his most beloved characters. After calmly finishing a Hershey bar alone in her car, a restless Patsy drives away from her lifeless marriage in search of a greater purpose. In "precise and lyrical prose" (Boston Globe), McMurtry reveals the complex, colorful lives of Pete, the rodeo clown; high-spirited cowboy Sonny Shanks; and impassioned grad student Hank. A critical work of American literature that "presents human drama with sympathy and compassion" (Los Angeles Times), Moving On unfolds a tale of perseverance and emotional survival in the modern-day West.

Hailed as one of "the best novels ever set in America's fourth largest city" (Douglas Brinkley, New York Times Book Review), All My Friends Are Going to Be Strangers is a powerful demonstration of Larry McMurtry's "comic genius, his ability to render a sense of landscape, and interior intellection tension" (Jim Harrison, New York Times Book Review). Desperate to break from the "mundane happiness" of Houston, budding writer Danny Deck hops in his car, "El Chevy," bound for the West Coast on a road trip filled with broken hearts and bleak realities of the artistic life. A cast of unforgettable characters joins the naive troubadour's pilgrimage to California and back to Texas, including a cruel, long-legged beauty; an appealing screenwriter; a randy college professor; and a genuine if painfully "normal" friend. Since the novel's publication in 1972, Danny Deck has "been far more successful at getting loved by readers than he ever was at getting loved by the women in his life" (McMurtry), a testament to the author's incomparable talent for capturing the essential tragicomedy of the human experience.

Not since the publication of his own beloved classic "Lonesome Dove" has there been a novel like this one -- another big, brilliant, unputdownable saga of the West from Larry McMurtry. "Telegraph Days" is at once a major work of literature and a completely absorbing read, not just great fiction, but fiction on a great scale, encompassing many years, many characters, real and fictional, and the whole vast landscape of place, time, life, and heart, which has served for more than one hundred thirty years as the background for "the Western" in fiction and on the screen. Nobody writes, or has ever written, better about the West than Larry McMurtry, and nobody has caught better in words its myths, its often brutal reality, its overwhelming size, and the way it captured both the imagination and the hopes of those who settled there, only, as was so often the case, to dash those hopes.

Told in the voice of Nellie Courtright, a spunky, courageous, attractive young woman whose story this is in part, "Telegraph Days" is the big novel of the Western gunfighters that people have been hoping for years Larry McMurtry would write.

When Nellie and her brother Jackson are unexpectedly orphaned by their father's suicide on his new and unprosperous ranch, they make their way to the nearby town of Rita Blanca, where Jackson manages to secure a job as a sheriff's deputy, while Nellie, ever resourceful, becomes the town's telegrapher.

Together, they inadvertently put Rita Blanca on the map when young Jackson succeeds in shooting down all six of the ferocious Yazee brothers in a gunfight that brings him lifelong fame but which he can never repeat because his success came purely out of luck.

Propelled by her own energy and commonsense approach to life, Nellie meets and almost conquers the heart of Buffalo Bill, the man she will love most in her long life, and goes on to meet, and witness the exploits of, Billy the Kid, the Earp brothers, and Doc Holliday. She even gets a ringside seat at the Battle at the O.K. Corral, the most famous gunfight in Western history, and eventually lives long enough to see the West and its gunfighters turned into movies.

Full of life, love, shootings, real Western heroes and villains, "Telegraph Days" is Larry McMurtry at his epic best, in his most ambitious Western novel since "Lonesome Dove."

Thirty years since its original publication, Ceremony remains one of the most profound and moving works of Native American literature, a novel that is itself a ceremony of healing. Tayo, a World War II veteran of mixed ancestry, returns to the Laguna Pueblo Reservation. He is deeply scarred by his experience as a prisoner of the Japanese and further wounded by the rejection he encounters from his people. Only by immersing himself in the Indian past can he begin to regain the peace that was taken from him. Masterfully written, filled with the somber majesty of Pueblo myth, Ceremony is a work of enduring power.

Larry McMurtry's Terms of Endearment touched readers in a way no other story has in recent years. The earthy humor and the powerful emotional impact that set this novel apart rise to brilliant new heights with The Evening Star.

McMurtry takes us deep into the heart of Texas, and deep into the heart of one of the most memorable characters of our time, Aurora Greenway -- along with her family, friends, and lovers -- in a tale of affectionate wit, bittersweet tenderness, and the unexpected turns that life can take. This is Larry McMurtry at his very best: warm, compassionate, full of comic invention, an author so attuned to the feelings, needs, and desires of his characters that they possess a reality unique in American fiction.

Part of the Penguin Orange Collection, a limited-run series of twelve influential and beloved American classics in a bold series design offering a modern take on the iconic Penguin paperback Winner of the 2016 AIGA + Design Observer 50 Books 50 Covers competition For the seventieth anniversary of Penguin Classics, the Penguin Orange Collection celebrates the heritage of Penguin's iconic book design with twelve influential American literary classics representing the breadth and diversity of the Penguin Classics library. These collectible editions are dressed in the iconic orange and white tri-band cover design, first created in 1935, while french flaps, high-quality paper, and striking cover illustrations provide the cutting-edge design treatment that is the signature of Penguin Classics Deluxe Editions today. Ceremony Almost forty years since its original publication, Ceremony remains one of the most profound and moving works of Native American literature--a novel that is itself a ceremony of healing. Masterfully written, filled with the somber majesty of Pueblo myth, Ceremony is a work of enduring power.

Internationally acclaimed for his portraits of powerful and accomplished people and women of great beauty, Richard Avedon was one of the twentieth century's greatest photographers—but perhaps not the most obvious choice to create a portrait of ordinary people of the American West. Yet in 1979, the Amon Carter Museum of Fort Worth, Texas, daringly commissioned him to do just that. The resulting 1985 exhibition and book, In the American West, was a milestone in American photography and Avedon's most important body of work. His unflinching portraits of oilfield and slaughterhouse workers, miners, waitresses, drifters, mental patients, teenagers, and others captured the unknown and often-ignored people who work at hard, uncelebrated jobs. Making no apologies for shattering stereotypes of the West and Westerners, Avedon said, "I'm looking for a new definition of a photographic portrait. I'm looking for people who are surprising—heartbreaking—or beautiful in a terrifying way. Beauty that might scare you to death until you acknowledge it as part of yourself." Photographer Laura Wilson worked with Avedon during the six years he was making In the American West. In Avedon at Work, she presents a unique photographic record of his creation of this masterwork—the first time a major photographer has been documented in great depth over an extended period of time. She combines images she made during the photographic sessions with entries from her journal to show Avedon's working methods, his choice of subjects, his creative process, and even his experiments and failures. Also included are a number of Avedon's finished portraits, as well as his own comments and letters from some of the subjects. Avedon at Work adds a new dimension to our understanding of one of the twentieth century's most significant series of portraits. For everyone interested in the creative process it confirms that, in Laura Wilson's words, "much as all these photographs may appear to be moments that just occurred, they are finally, in varying degrees, works of the imagination."