Butcher's Crossing

by John Williams

Overview

Em 1870, Will Andrews chega a Butcher's Crossing. E jovem, fartou-se de Harvard, quer descobrir na natureza o seu "eu inalterado". E naquele vilarejo, num Oeste prestes a ser domado, encontra o seu mentor: Miller, um cacador de poucas falas, que conhece o refugio da ultima grande manada de bufalos. Seduzido pela promessa de aventura, Will junta-se a expedic?o. Quatro homens em marcha, numa luta epica contra o tempo, a sede e os elementos. Depois de chegarem ao vale, o que se segue e uma carnificina, a viagem iniciatica de Will ao corac?o das trevas. Butcher's Crossing e considerada a primeira das tres grandes obras de John Williams. Tal como Stoner, o romance passou despercebido durante mais de meio seculo e so agora foi resgatado por um coro invulgarmente unanime de criticos e autores, que viram na obra o antiwestern por excelencia, despido de romantismo e eivado de uma crueza visceral (que muito influenciaria a obra de Cormac McCarthy). Escrito com a precis?o quase maniaca que caracteriza John Williams, a obra e a negac?o do legado de Ralph Waldo Emerson, cuja epigrafe abre o romance. A natureza que aqui nos deslumbra e apenas a humana - e por pouco resiste ao confronto com o Oeste selvagem.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9789722058438
Publisher:	D. QUIXOTE
Publication date:	10/01/2015
Sold by:	Grupos Editorial Leya
Format:	eBook
File size:	569 KB
Language:	Portuguese

About the Author

John Williams (1922—1994) was born in Texas. He taught for many years at the University of Denver, where he was head of the creative writing program. Williams won the 1973 National Book Award in fiction for Augustus. His novel Stoner is also published as an NYRB Classic.

Michelle Latiolais is an associate professor of English at the UC Irvine. Her novel, Even Now, won a Gold Medal from the Commonwealth Club of California. She has recently published fiction and essays in The Antioch Review, Santa Monica Review, and ZYZZYVA.

Editorial Reviews

"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." —Time Out New York

 

"Harsh and relentless yet muted in tone, Butcher's Crossing paved the way for Cormac McCarthy. It was perhaps the first and best revisionist western." —The New York Times Book Review

 

"One of the finest novels of the West ever to come out of the West."—The Denver Post

“Butcher's Crossing is perhaps the finest western in literature. John Williams may have published only a few novels, but they were all just about perfect. Although the subject and story is much different than Williams's Stoner, Butcher's Crossing is equally beautiful, heartbreaking, and historically accurate." —Jeffrey J, Powell’s City of Books blog

"Williams didn't write much compared with some novelists, but everything he did was exceedingly fine...it's a shame that he's not more often read today...But it's great that at least two of his novels [Stoner, Butcher's Crossing] have found their way back into print." —The Denver Post

 

“Reading John Williams–even to have done so at the time these novels were written–is an exercise in nostalgia, a nostalgia found also in writers like Willa Cather, for whom the West represented a lost redoubt of intellectual dignity...It is tempting to say that Cather's tradition flagged because the West has changed – it is no longer anybody's bildungsroman–but it is safer to say that writers as talented and right-minded as John Williams are not naturally plentiful.” –New York Sun

 

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, a rarity in writing about the west. More, John Williams."—The Chicago Tribune

 

"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."—Times Literary Supplement

 

“Butcher’s Crossing dismantles the myth of the west, revealing a horror story about the grinding day to day of just surviving…[a] restrained and gorgeous lyricism…even in its softer moments it doesn’t overdo anything, and the moral criticism is in the precision of the language, the now-famous simple and elegant Williams prose.” —Bret Easton Ellis, The Guardian

From the Publisher