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Aged 65, Emmett Dalton is the last survivor of the legendary Dalton gang. Now he lives off his memories in Hollywood. Combining fact and fiction, Ron Hansen depicts the outlaw past of the Daltons and the West they travelled. The Dalton brothers turn from being peace officers in the Indian territories to a life of rustling. When their leader, Bob, meets Eugenia Moore, a schoolteacher who begins to plan their robberies, they become the most notorious outlaws of their time. As their raids, on trains and banks, become more daring and successful the price on their heads and the pursuit of the law increase. Then they ride into Coffeyville, intending to rob both the town's banks. Ron Hansen was the...
The highly acclaimed and provocatively rendered story of a young postulant's claim to divine possession and religious ecstasy.
In this retelling of one of the great classic tales of the American West, James comes across as a complex character, a new age type with an interest in parapsychology and alternative medicine, a farmer, a family man and a stone-cold killer.
“Beautifully crafted stories from one of our most honored authors” (The New York Times), Ron Hansen’s She Loves Me Not is an acclaimed collection of stunning fiction, three decades in the writing. Ron Hansen has long been celebrated as a master of both the novel and the short form. His stories have been called “extraordinary” (The New York Times Book Review) and “wise and smart” (The Washington Post). In She Loves Me Not, the subjects of Hansen’s scrutiny range from Oscar Wilde to murder to dementia to romance, and display Hansen at his storytelling best: These are “unforgettable stories, each utterly different from the one before….This is writing that slows the breathing...
With Exiles, Ron Hansen tells the story of a notorious shipwreck that prompted Gerard Manley Hopkins to break years of "elected silence" with an outpouring of dazzling poetry. In December 1875 the steamship Deutschland left Bremen, bound for England and then America. On board were five young nuns who, exiled by Bismarck's laws against Catholic religious orders, were going to begin their lives anew in Missouri. Early one morning, the ship ran aground in the Thames and more than sixty lives were lost—including those of the five nuns. Hopkins was a Jesuit seminarian in Wales, and he was so moved by the news of the shipwreck that he wrote a grand poem about it, his first serious work since aba...
"A textured picture of Hitler's histrionic personality and his insane mission for glory, presaging the genocide to come in the cold-blooded obliteration of one young woman." — Publishers Weekly Hitler's Niece tells the story of the intense and disturbing relationship between Adolf Hitler and the daughter of his only half-sister, Angela, a drama that evolves against the backdrop of Hitler's rise to prominence and power from particularly inauspicious beginnings. The story follows Geli from her birth in Linz, Austria, through the years in Berchtesgaden and Munich, to her tragic death in 1932 in Hitler's apartment in Munich. Through the eyes of a favorite niece who has been all but lost to history, we see the frightening rise in prestige and political power of a vain, vulgar, sinister man who thrived on cruelty and hate and would stop at nothing to keep the horror of his inner life hidden from the world.
In this vivid and deeply felt collection of essays, Ron Hansen talks about his novels, childhood, family, and mentors such as John Gardner. He explores prayer, stigmata, twentieth-century martyrs, and the Eucharist. A profile of his grandfather, a "tough-as-nails, brook-no-guff Colorado rancher," finds a place alongside a wonderfully informative portrait of Saint Ignatius of Loyola. A brilliant reading of a story by Leo Tolstoy follows an appreciation of the poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins. Surprisingly intimate, A Stay Against Confusion brings together the literary and religious impulses that inform the life of one of our most gifted fiction writers.
From the acclaimed author of Atticus and Mariette in Ecstasy comes a stylish novel set in the hard-drinking, fast-living New York City of the Jazz Age that follows two lovers in a torrid affair on an arc of murder and sexual self-destruction. Based on a real case whose lurid details scandalized Americans in 1927 and sold millions of newspapers, acclaimed novelist Ron Hansen’s latest work is a tour de force of erotic tension and looming violence. Trapped in a loveless marriage, Ruth Snyder is a voluptuous, reckless, and altogether irresistible woman who wishes not only to escape her husband but that he die—and the sooner the better. No less miserable in his own tedious marriage is Judd Gr...
Stories of the heartland by the National Book Award finalist and author of The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford. “Nebraska captures a rowdy, changing America. Written with wit and brawny lyricism, in voices ranging from hip to tender, the stories gathered here are as diverse and expansive as the country they celebrate…References to America’s heartland abound throughout the book and serve as a central metaphor for what’s close to American hearts, what connects us: dreams, myths and possibilities as vast as the Great Plains. Wise and smart-alecky, creaking with legend and crackling with modernisms, these tales are about American obsessions past and present.” –...
"An exciting new anthology of short fiction chosen by thirty-five of this country's most distinguished and popular fiction writers, You've Got to Read This offers readers an unusually intimate glimpse into how accomplished writers experience literature." "Here are stories that inspired today's leading novelists and short-story writers to embark on their own writing careers, stories that took their breath away and changed them, or the way they responded to literature, forever. Oscar Hijuelos confesses his debt to the great Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges, whose brilliant story "The Aleph" inspired him to become a writer himself. Mary Gordon stands in awe of what James Joyce wrought in "The...