Butcher's Crossing

Now a Major Film

Format:

Buy the book from:

Amazon Blackwells Bookshop.org Foyles Hive Waterstones WHSmith

**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.

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
Kate Atkinson, Irish Times

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
Archie Bland, Independent

About John Williams

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.

Details

Imprint: Vintage Classics
Published: 05/12/2013
ISBN: 9780099589679
Length: 352 pages
Dimensions: 198mm x 21mm x 129mm
Weight: 246g
Price: £9.99

All editions

Butcher's Crossing

Now a Major Film

Format:

Buy the book from:

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

Superbly understated

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

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

About John Williams

Follow penguin

Follow ladybird

Follow puffin

Sign up to the Penguin newsletter