Nothing But the Night

The first novel by the brilliant John Williams, author of Stoner

John Williams was an author, editor and professor. Born in 1922 in Texas, he served in the United States Army Air Force from 1942 to 1945 in China, Burma and India. His first novel, Nothing But the Night, was published in 1948. After receiving his PhD in 1954, Williams returned to the University of Denver where he first studied to teach literature and creative writing for thirty years. It was during this time that he wrote the novels Butcher's Crossing (1960) and Stoner (1965). His last novel, Augustus, won the National Book Award in 1973. John Williams died in Arkansas in 1994.

Arthur Maxley is a tense and listless young man. One day he receives a letter from his long-estranged father. Arthur's fear and aversion to the man is powerful, yet his compulsion to see his father is irresistible. After their meeting, Arthur is propelled into a night of drinking and spontaneous intimacy with a beautiful young woman. But as the memories of childhood trauma surface and disorientate, Arthur's night out rises towards the pitch of disaster.

Butcher's Crossing

The author of Stoner delivers something completely different but equally unique, skewering romantic notions of the Wild West with a brilliant, brutal tale of buffalo hunters that reverberates with understated power.

His Stoner is the book that has garnered the attention, but I prefer this earlier take on the Western genre…it has some gory, visceral passages that are not for the faint-hearted

Shorn of sentimentality or decoration, the events and places [Williams] describes begin to feel inescapable, permanent, and rivetingly dramatic. This is language that seems to be carved into stone – into mountains... Stoner showed us a writer who had written a great book. To those of us who didn't know already, Butcher's Crossing reveals John Williams to be more than that: forgotten writer as he was, he was unquestionably also a great one

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

Harsh and relentless yet muted in tone, Butcher’s Crossing paved the way for Cormac McCarthy

Butcher's Crossing is like a western by Joseph Conrad...wonderful...beautifully written

This 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

It is the novel's immense visual power and tangibility of material detail, its fully realized sense of time and place, its telling incidents, its nimble and subtle resonance with the Bible, and its fleshed-out characters, that make it a very great work

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

Butcher’s Crossing is remarkable for the accuracy of Williams’s prose

[Williams] has produced something timeless and great’ ‘Butcher’s Crossing, written in 1960 and Williams’s first mature novel, is far removed from the time and place of Stoner. It may also be the better novel

Had me on the edge of my seat... If you do not read another book all year, read this one. At the end, I was quite gasping for breath

It is a novel of great beauty and power, and it deserves the same belated recognition accorded Stoner

From the author of Stoner, a western full of the same psychological intensity

Readers of Stoner will hopefully come to Butcher’s Crossing to get more of what Williams can provide: thoughtfulness, strong writing, powerful characterisation, involving drama and images and details that remain in the reader’s mind long after reading

The evocation of landscape is unforgettable

Williams's intense semi-skimmed prose – so different from [Herman] Melville's full-fat variety – has the same power to mesmerize... Likely to become a favourite of 2014

The tale of men struggling to survive in a brutal landscape is told in language so sparse that whole passages are made up of monosyllabic vocabulary that is powerfully immersive. You can only guess at the influence Williams may have had on Cormac McCarthy

Williams is a versatile writer: the story of Will Andrews couldn't be more different to the tale of William Stoner – and his depiction of the behaviour of men in extreme situations is masterful

A meditative cowboy yarn with a putative ecological message, it could not be more different from Williams’s [Stoner]; it is just as good

It is a sort of Dances with Buffaloes, and one of the most tense, gripping, tragic novels I have ever read

Stoner...is a fine book but his western novel Butcher's Crossing is even better... Visceral, violent and chilling.

A novel that turns upside down the expectations of the genre—and goes to war with a century of American triumphalism, a century of regeneration through violence, a century of senseless slaughter.

**NOW A MAJOR FILM** 
 
BY THE AUTHOR OF STONER 
 
Will Andrews is no academic. He longs for wildness, freedom, hope and vigour. He leaves Harvard and sets out for the West to discover a new way of living. 
 
In a small town called Butcher's Crossing he meets a hunter with a story of a lost herd of buffalo in a remote Colorado valley, just waiting to be taken by a team of men brave and crazy enough to find them. Will makes up his mind to be one of those men, but the journey, the killing, harsh conditions and sheer hard luck will test his mind and body to their limits.

A Novel

Augustus

'Williams has fashioned an always engaging, psychologically convincing work of fiction-a consistent and well-realized portrait' The New Yorker

Weir’s sympathetic and detailed biography reassesses the life of a woman whose role in public life…has been underrated by historians

The finest historical novel ever written by an American

It would be easy to over-praise this novel; but there does not seem any adequate reason why this temptation should be resisted

A novel of extraordinary range, yet of extraordinary minuteness, that manages never to sacrifice one quality for the other

Williams has fashioned an always engaging, psychologically convincing work of fiction - a consistent and well-realized portrait

A highly imaginative account of the life and times of Augustus-a brilliant novel

A brilliant epistolary novel about Octavius Caesar and ancient Rome...all three [of John Williams'] novels show a similar narrative arc: a young man's initiation, vicious male rivalries, subtler tensions between men and women, fathers and daughters, and finally a bleak sense of disappointment, even futility.

A vividly imagined re-creation of classical Rome, but its intuitive grasp of the experience of immense power makes it an unusual, and superior, novel

There could be no better year than 2014 to rediscover this one

BY THE AUTHOR OF STONER, THE SURPRISE INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER: 
 
Colum McCann once called Stoner one of the great forgotten novels of the past century, but it seems it is forgotten no longer – in 2013 translations of Stoner began appearing on bestseller lists across Europe. Forty-eight years after its first, quiet publication in the US, Stoner is finally finding the wide and devoted readership it deserves. Have you read it yet? 
 
'A beautiful, sad, utterly convincing account of an entire life… I’m amazed a novel this good escaped general attention for so long' Ian McEwan 
 
'A terrific novel of echoing sadness' Julian Barnes 
 
'Stoner is a brilliant, beautiful, inexorably sad, wise, and elegant novel' Nick Hornby, The Believer 
 
'I have read few novels as deep and as clear as John Williams' Stoner. It deserves to be called a quiet classic of American literature' Chad Harbach, author of The Art of Fielding 
 
'So beautifully paced and cadenced that it deserves the status of classic' Colum McCann, Guardian 
 
'A beautiful and moving novel, as sweeping, intimate and mysterious as life itself' Geoff Dyer

By the author of Stoner, the surprise international bestseller 
 
After the brutal murder of his great-uncle, Julius Caesar, Octavian, a shy and scholarly youth of nineteen, suddenly finds himself heir to the vast power of Rome. He is destined, despite vicious power struggles, bloody wars and family strife, to transform his realm and become the greatest ruler the western world had ever seen: Augustus Caesar, the first Roman Emperor. 
 
Building on impeccable research, John Williams brings the legendary figure of Augustus vividly to life, and invests his characters with such profound humanity that we enter completely into the heat and danger of their lives and times.

John Williams

John McGahern

This is the story of a quiet man, destined to be a farmer but who becomes an academic. It is book in which nothing and everything happens and is possibly the greatest novel you've never read. 
 
'It's simply a novel about a guy who goes to college and becomes a teacher. But its one of the most fascinating things that you've ever come across' Tom Hanks, Time 
 
William Stoner enters the University of Missouri at nineteen to study agriculture. A seminar on English literature changes his life, and he never returns to work on his father's farm. Stoner becomes a teacher. He marries the wrong woman. His life is quiet, and after his death, his colleagues remember him rarely. 
 
Yet with truthfulness, compassion and intense power, this novel uncovers a story of universal value - of the conflicts, defeats and victories of the human race that pass unrecorded by history - and in doing so reclaims the significance of an individual life. 
 
'A beautiful, sad, utterly convincing account of an entire life' Ian McEwan 
 
'A brilliant, beautiful, inexorably sad, wise and elegant novel' Nick Hornby 
 
INTRODUCED BY JOHN McGAHERN

John Williams

Books by John Williams

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