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Oakley Hall's legendary Warlock revisits and reworks the traditional conventions of the Western to present a raw, funny, hypnotic, ultimately devastating picture of American unreality. First published in the 1950s, at the height of the McCarthy era, Warlock is not only one of the most original and entertaining of modern American novels but a lasting contribution to American fiction. "Tombstone, Arizona, during the 1880's is, in ways, our national Camelot: a never-never land where American virtues are embodied in the Earps, and the opposite evils in the Clanton gang; where the confrontation at the OK Corral takes on some of the dry purity of the Arthurian joust. Oakley Hall, in his very fine ...
The legendary lost crime novel from Pulitzer Prize finalist Oakley Hall, instructor of Ann Rice, Amy Tan, Richard Ford, and Michael Chabon, who calls SO MANY DOORS "Beautiful, powerful, even masterful." It begins on Death Row, with a condemned man refusing the services of the lawyer assigned to defend him. It begins with a beautiful woman dead, murdered - Vassilia Caroline Baird, known to all simply as V. That's where this extraordinary novel begins. But the story it tells begins years earlier, on a struggling farm in the shadow of the Great Depression and among the brawling "cat skinners" of Southern California, driving graders and bulldozers to tame the American West. And the story that unfolds, in the masterful hands of acclaimed author Oakley Hall, is a lyrical outpouring of hunger and grief, of jealousy and corruption, of raw sexual yearning and the tragedy of the destroyed lives it leaves in its wake. Unpublished for more than half a century, So Many Doors is Hall's masterpiece, an excoriating vision of human nature at its most brutal, and one of the most powerful books you will ever read.
From the acclaimed author of Warlock comes “an elegiac, incandescent 1880s Dakota badlands Western that bears comparison to the greats” (Kirkus). It’s 1883 in Johnson County, in the old Dakota Territory—a rugged, wide-open landscape of rolling red earth, prairie, and cattle as far as the eye can see. But the land is closing, the “Beef Bonanza” is ending, and the free-range cattlemen are stuck watching their way of life disappear in a blaze of drought and gunfire. An action-packed western from one of the masters of the genre, Oakley Hall’s The Bad Lands blends roundups and rustlers, whorehouses and land grabs, shoot-outs and the threat of hangings in a tale of the war between the cowboys and the cattle barons. But more than this, it is an elegy to the wild beauty of the badlands before the ranchers moved in, chased off the free-rangers, the trappers, and the tribes, and fenced it all in. “Readers unable to suppress an unfashionable yearning for a good story will be delighted with The Bad Lands.”—Larry McMurtry, The New York Times
The Morton Street Slasher has been leaving the corpses of his victims around San Francisco's Union Square. On the women's naked bodies are spade playing cards. The city's infamous newspaperman, Ambrose Bierce, blames the rash of murders on his old enemy, the Southern Pacific Railroad. A naive reporter at Bierce's Hornet pursues the case, uncovering conspiracy at every turn. In a fast-paced novel that is a combination of murder mystery, historical fiction, and quirky biography, Oakley Hall draws the reader into 1880s San Francisco and the changing world that was California in the latter part of the nineteenth century. Local and state politics, the exploitation of the Chinese, the power of the...
"Timeless advice with examples from literary masters -- Flaubert to Hemingway to Oates."--
The Grand Canyon country of the 1880s is the setting of Oakley Hall's compelling new novel. As the plot unfolds, the West of the late nineteenth century is displayed in all its vastness and complexity. Hall carries us from the wild, perilous depths of the Canyon to the drawing rooms of San Francisco, from the desolate Mormon settlements and Indian camps of the Southwest to the haciendas of Old California. And he reveals once again his consummate power as a storyteller as he brings to life the fierce conflicts of the day - between rapacious mining and railroad barons eager to exploit the riches of the West and those who would preserve its beauty pristine; between Mormons and Gentiles; between land-hungry whites and beleaguered Indians; between men and the women they would love, and use. And the fiercest conflict of all - between man and nature.
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Is this Alfred Jarry finally writing Oakley Hall III's autobiography or the other way around? It reads--magnificently--as both at the same time, thus as another instance of that hidden wisdom: we are never only one, but always the occasion of many. Maybe it is Ubu himself fondling the hen, I mean holding the pen? Was there ever pathos in Pataphysics? If not, here it is: one bridge further, Oakley Hall III is at it again, biosplicing his & Jarry s life in the theater and Jarry and his theater in life. You are hereby introduced into the Hall of Post-Pataphysics. -- Prof. Pierre Joris, author of Poasis and A Nomad Poetics
Think of your fiction like a clock, a marvel of mainsprings and wheels, pinions and pendulums. It's an extraordinary organization of diverse elements, channeling energy and tension into the regular coordination of action and reaction, rotating gears and moving hands. &break;&break;Oakley Hall, writing teacher emeritus, invites you as his apprentice to study fiction's inner workings, the pegs and screws upon which a good story depends. You'll find the elements of fiction examined and illuminated, with insights into how they must interact to create a distinctive story. &break;&break;In sharing lessons taught by years of experience and by citing examples from dozens of esteemed writers, Hall makes working alongside a master thoroughly pleasurable, as well as an invaluable opportunity to craft fiction that is tuned like a precision timepiece.
The authors present a new edition of their highly successful introductory textbook. The book has been enlarged and fully revised. Through clear and concise text, attractive presentation and the use of beautiful colour plates, the biology student is drawn into this fascinating introduction to the photosynthetic process. The authors discuss photosynthesis at both a macro and molecular level, placing new ideas in the context of past, present and future research. The role of photosynthesis as a source of food and fuel is highlighted. The student is also encouraged to think practically with a useful chapter on simple laboratory experiments. The book will appeal to students and teachers of biology from those doing A-levels to undergraduate degrees.