A new customer review of my book on Amazon:
Can’t say I’m an expert on western fiction. I can’t remember reading any before this but I do love great stories and these are great stories. I read the whole collection in three sessions over a week and went back to re-read three of them. That’s how great these stories are…
Fourteen Western Stories — available in paperback and Kindle editions.
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Via Bryan Castañeda . . .
The Jodi Arias trial can be read as the great, sad, banal epic of our time. It involves a lot of sensational material — the sex lives of Mormon youth, the unbelievably savage killing of a young man by his sometime lover, an attractive and intelligent young woman — but what’s riveting is the context brought forth in the trial evidence and testimony. This context delivers a portrait of people making a massive digital record of their lives, lives that seem less and less substantial, more and more bewildered and aimless, the more we learn about them.
It’s profound — public theater on a par with the Watergate and Iran-Contra hearings and the O. J. Simpson trail but involving ordinary middle-class people leading ordinary middle-class lives, which are revealed as utterly devastating in their existential emptiness and hopelessness.
It’s all in the details, though, in the vast accumulation of details — snippets of the sensational revelations give no idea of what this trial has to tell us. Not even the greatest of novelists, with the possible exception of Tolstoy, could convey it with the same authority, insight and impact.
The Academy Of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences admitted today what many have long suspected — everybody in Hollywood is dead. Presenting the Oscar ceremonies tonight required the efforts of hundreds of technicians and morticians to reanimate and decorate the corpses of those in the film business.
The effort was recognized as generally successful, despite the dreadful smell of rotten flesh emanating from the Dolby Theater, located on Hollywood Boulevard in Los Angeles, where the ceremonies were held.
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World War II and some personal heartache come to the Green River Valley of Wyoming — one of the tales in Fourteen Western Stories, available on Amazon for the Kindle and for free Kindle reading apps, which work on almost all computers and portable devices.
Now available, too, in a paperback edition you’ll be proud to display alongside other fine literature in your home:
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In December 2010, Jodi Arias beat out 50 other inmates to win an “American Idol”-style caroling contest for Inmates held by “America’s Toughest Sheriff,” Joe Arpaio, at the Maricopa County jail.
Her prize was a stocking full of Christmas goodies and a turkey dinner for herself and her cellmates.
Jodi is currently on trial for murdering her boyfriend (or ex-boyfriend) by stabbing him 29 times, cutting his throat and then shooting him in the head as he was bleeding out.
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Asked about the Westerns that inspired his own Western fiction, Elmore Leonard said:
I’m inspired and motivated more by a novel that isn’t a Western — though it seems to have the basic elements — than by traditional Western novels and motion pictures; and that’s Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls.