Will Patton

Returning to the territory of "Brokeback Mountain," National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize-winner Annie Proulx delivers a stunning and visceral collection of new stories. In Fine Just the Way It Is, she has expanded the limits of the form. Her stories about multiple generations of Americans struggling through life in the West are a ferocious, dazzling panorama of American folly and fate. Proulx's characters try to climb out of poverty and desperation...

A New York Times Notable Book for 2011 One of The Economist's 2011 Books of the Year One of NPR's 10 Best Novels of 2011 Denis Johnson's Train Dreams is an epic in miniature, one of his most evocative and poignant fictions. Robert Grainer is a day laborer in the American West at the start of the twentieth century-an ordinary man in extraordinary times. Buffeted by the loss of his family, Grainer struggles to make sense of this strange new world. As...

Legendary author Larry McMurtry-who has both a Pulitzer Prize and an Academy Award to his credit-concludes the story of Duane Moore, who first appeared in the 1966 classic The Last Picture Show. Fast approaching 70, Duane is adjusting to the loneliness of retirement. Then things get stirred up when a billionaire heiress moves to the area and opens a rhinoceros sanctuary. ". a top-shelf blend of wit and insight, sharply defined characters and to-the-point...

Here are two complete audiobooks by Denis Johnson, narrated by Will Patton. Listen to both Train Dreams, and Jesus' Son, as well as an excerpt from Denis Johnson's National Book Award-winning Tree of Smoke. In Train Dreams Robert Grainer is a day laborer in the American West at the start of the 20th century-an ordinary man in extraordinary times. Buffeted by the loss of his family, Grainer struggles to make sense of this strange new world. As his...

Once upon a time there was a war . . . and a young American who thought of himself as the Quiet American and the Ugly American, and who wished to be neither, who wanted instead to be the Wise American, or the Good American, but who eventually came to witness himself as the Real American and finally as simply the Fucking American. That's me. This is the story of Skip Sands-spy-in-training, engaged in Psychological Operations against the Vietcong-and...

When a beautiful teenage girl is killed, the victim of a particularly savage rape, New Iberia, Louisiana police detective Dave Robicheaux senses from the very start of the investigation that the most likely suspect -- Tee Bobby Hulin -- is not the actual killer. Though a drug addict and general ne'er-do-well, Hulin doesn't fit the profile for this brutal crime. But when another body turns up -- a drugged-out prostitute who is the daughter of a local...

Cajun police detective Dave Robicheaux knows the Sonnier family of New Iberia - their connections to the CIA, the mob, and to a former Klansman now running for state office. And he knows their past - as dark and murky as a night on the Louisiana bayou. An assassination attempt and the death of a cop draw Robicheaux into the Sonniers' dangerous web of madness, murder and incest. But Robicheaux has devils of his own. And they've come out of hiding...

Finished in 1947 and lost to readers until now, House of Earth is legendary folk singer and American icon Woody Guthrie's only finished novel. A powerful portrait of Dust Bowl America, it's the story of an ordinary couple's dreams of a better life and their search for love and meaning in a corrupt world. Tike and Ella May Hamlin are struggling to plant roots in the arid land of the Texas panhandle. The husband and wife live in a precarious wooden...

Trouble follows Dave Robicheaux. Swan Peak finds Detective Robicheaux far from his New Iberia roots, attempting to relax in the untouched wilderness of rural Montana. He, his wife, and his buddy Clete Purcell have retreated to stay at an old friend's ranch, hoping to spend their days fishing and enjoying their distance from the harsh, gritty landscape of Louisiana post-Katrina. But the serenity is soon shattered when two college students are found...

Not since Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath has there been a family saga as powerful as Bucking the Sun or a family as compellingly strife-torn as the one at its center. Driven by drought from their Montana farm to "relief work" building the Fort Peck Dam, the Duff family spans the extremes of the times, from the eldest son Owen, who has made his way through college to an engineer's job on the dam to young Bruce, his antithesis, a risk-taker who works...