Books by Thomas McGuane
Some Horses: Essays
In Some Horses, Tom McGuane animates the wide prairie, the ranches where cattle roam and cutting horses are trained, and the packed coliseums in which these horses compete for prestige and prize money. Best of all, McGuane brings to life the horses he has known, celebrating the unique glories that make each of them memorable.
McGuane's writing is infused with a love of the cowboy life and the animals and people who inhabit that world where the intimate dance between horse and rider is as magical as flight--well beyond what the human body could ever discover on its own.
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The Cadence of Grass: A Novel
Set on the majestic stage of Montana cattle country, an unforgettable drama from the acclaimed author of Ninety-two in the Shade and Cloudbursts involving blood, money, sex, vengeance, and a cross-dressing rancher
"[McGuane's] sentences are like no one else’s, crisp and spare, yet somehow baroque [and] perpetually balance the picaresque against the sublime." —The New Yorker
Sunny Jim Whitelaw, a descendent of pioneers and owner of a large bottling plant, may have died, but he has no intention of relinquishing control: his will specifies that no one gets a cent unless his daughter Evelyn reconciles with her estranged husband, Paul. But Evelyn is a strong-willed woman, fiercely attached to the land, whose horses transport her to a West she feels is disappearing, while Paul is a suave manipulator, without scruples, intent on living well.
The Cadence of Grass is renewed evidence that McGuane is one of the finest writers we have, capable of simultaneously burnishing and demolishing the mythology of the West while doing rope tricks with the English language.
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The Longest Silence: A Life in Fishing
From the highly acclaimed author of Ninety-Two in the Shade and Nothing but Blue Skies comes this collection of breathtakingly exquisite essays borne of a lifetime spent fishing.
The thirty-three essays in The Longest Silence take us from the tarpon of Florida to the salmon of Iceland, from the bonefish of Mexico to the trout of Montana. They bring us characters as varied as a highly literate Canadian frontiersman and a devoutly Mormon river guide and address issues ranging from the esoteric art of tying flies to the enduring philosophy of a seventeenth-century angler. Infused with a deep experience of wildlife and the outdoors, both reverent and hilarious by turns, The Longest Silence sets the heart pounding for a glimpse of moving water and demonstrates what dedication to sport reveals about life.
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The Longest Silence: A Life in Fishing
From the highly acclaimed author of Ninety-two in the Shade and Cloudbursts comes a collection of alternately playful and exquisite essays—including seven collected here for the first time—borne of a lifetime spent fishing.
"Thomas McGuane writes about fishing better than anyone else in the history of mankind." —Jim Harrison, New York Times bestselling author of Legends of the Fall
The forty extraordinary pieces in The Longest Silence take the reader from the tarpon of Florida to the salmon of Iceland, from the bonefish of Mexico to the trout of Montana. They introduce characters as varied as a highly literate Canadian frontiersman and a devoutly Mormon river guide and address issues ranging from the esoteric art of tying flies to the enduring philosophy of a seventeenth-century angler to the trials of the aging fisherman.
Both reverent and hilarious by turns, and infused with a deep experience of wildlife and the outdoors, The Longest Silence sets the heart pounding for a glimpse of moving water and demonstrates what dedication to sport reveals about life.
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$18.00
Horses
by Seymour Simon, Thomas McGuane, unknown author, Laura Driscoll, A. M. Homes, Yann Arthus-Bertrand, Jill Greenberg, Nicola Jane Swinney, Jean-Louis Gouraud
None
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Horses
by Seymour Simon, Thomas McGuane, unknown author, Laura Driscoll, A. M. Homes, Yann Arthus-Bertrand, Jill Greenberg, Nicola Jane Swinney, Jean-Louis Gouraud
Travel the world of horses, with two major American artists as your guides.
Horses and humans have a long history together, from wild steppe to farm field to battlefield, from rodeo arena to backyard. In Horses, Jay Dusard and Thomas McGuane illuminate the special bond that grows between riders and mounts. Their book is a memorable collaboration between two masters: Dusard offers his insight in words as well as in his extraordinary photography, McGuane in a pair of essays.
"Those who love horses are impelled by an ever-receding vision, some enchanted transformation through which the horse and the rider become a third, much greater thing," writes McGuane, also an acclaimed novelist and horseman. More than words, more than pictures, this slim, beautiful book is also a "third thing."
"To some people," McGuane observes, "horses have wings." Comic, exquisite, gritty, and wiseHorses flies on wings of its own. 45 b/w and color photos.
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Horses
by Seymour Simon, Thomas McGuane, unknown author, Laura Driscoll, A. M. Homes, Yann Arthus-Bertrand, Jill Greenberg, Nicola Jane Swinney, Jean-Louis Gouraud
In Horses, Seymour Simon introduces elementary-school readers to horses through engaging descriptions and stunning full-color photographs. He teaches readers all about horses through pictures, diagrams, and maps. This book includes a glossary and index.
What animal can . . . run so fast, its feet don't always touch the ground, weigh more than 2,000 pounds, sense people's emotions by their smell, . . . and wear shoes? Why, a horse, of course!
Horses are some of the most fascinating--and important--creatures on Earth. In fact, our world would not be the way it is today if not for horses. Horses have carried medieval knights into battle, transported settlers to the American West, and hauled fire engines and buses. They even turned the wheels that provided power for factories! But one of their greatest, most enduring gifts to us is companionship and trust.
Supports the Common Core State Standards
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Horses
by Seymour Simon, Thomas McGuane, unknown author, Laura Driscoll, A. M. Homes, Yann Arthus-Bertrand, Jill Greenberg, Nicola Jane Swinney, Jean-Louis Gouraud
Saddle up for a look at kids' favorite horses—sporting horses, working horses, and different breeds, too—in this stunning photographic book for the youngest horse lovers.
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Horses
by Seymour Simon, Thomas McGuane, unknown author, Laura Driscoll, A. M. Homes, Yann Arthus-Bertrand, Jill Greenberg, Nicola Jane Swinney, Jean-Louis Gouraud
Best known for her amazingly anthropomorphic and affectionate portraits of monkeys and bears, Jill Greenberg turns her lens to horses for her new photographic collection. This is the perfect gift for every horse lover. In this beautifully conceived volume, Jill Greenberg captures the powerful, romantic, and enigmatic nature of horses through her signature lens in photographs that make these animals all the more otherworldly yet familiar. Where Greenberg’s earlier books explored the mystery and depth of emotion behind some of nature’s most dangerous creatures (Kodiak and polar bears, baboons, and gibbons, among others), Horses is an elegiac exploration of these heroic and often idealized creatures. Transformed by Greenberg’s lens, the horse’s powerful physical beauty becomes a hyper-real vision, and her gorgeous prints seduce us in a subtle manner with their sensuous, painterly textures. Horses were Greenberg’s first muse and love, and for this portfolio she returns to her original inspiration. Featuring stunning photographs of a range of horse breeds, from Friesians and Andalusians to Arabian stallions, Lusitanos, and thoroughbred performance horses, this book is a gorgeous tribute to these spirited and powerful creatures and the perfect gift for those officially and unofficially devoted to horses, horseback riding, and racing.
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Horses
by Seymour Simon, Thomas McGuane, unknown author, Laura Driscoll, A. M. Homes, Yann Arthus-Bertrand, Jill Greenberg, Nicola Jane Swinney, Jean-Louis Gouraud
The lives of humans and horses have been intricately linked for thousands of years, with equines depicted in cave paintings dating back to 5000 BC. Horses have been developed by humans for many purposes--for war, for working in the field and in industry, for competitive sports events such as the Olympic Games, and as pets. Horses covers the world's most charismatic and iconic breeds, from the noble Arab and Akhal-Teke, through working breeds such as the mighty Percheron and diminutive Fell pony, to 'primitive' equines such as Przewalski's Horse and the Polish Konik.
Each breed entry showcases a unique and beautiful equine breed, showing it in magnificent full-color photographs; these are accompanied by a historical account of the breed's origins and history. More than 70 amazingly diverse breeds are featured.
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Horses
by Seymour Simon, Thomas McGuane, unknown author, Laura Driscoll, A. M. Homes, Yann Arthus-Bertrand, Jill Greenberg, Nicola Jane Swinney, Jean-Louis Gouraud
The most visually stunning book ever produced about horses, in a portable new format.
This sumptuous tribute to the earth's most beautiful animal has been redesigned in a new mini format that is 100 pages longer than the original. Renowned photographer Yann Arthus-Bertrand—master of light and shadow, angle and exposure—etches these magnificent creatures and their human partners in photographs shot on location and around the globe, from Montana to Russia, central Asia to Argentina, Mongolia and Cameroon, and points in between. Each moment captured offers a glimpse of the breath of humanity, and man's powerful and moving relationship with the horse. Full of tribal costume, local color, and panoramic scenery—accompanied by the text of equine expert Jean-Louis Gouraud—Horses is a project of unparalleled ambition and scope.
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Crow Fair: Stories (Vintage Contemporaries)
Set in Big Sky Country, a triumphant collection of stories written with a comic genius in the vein of Twain and Gogol—from from the acclaimed author of Ninety-two in the Shade and Cloudbursts, “one of America's best short-story writers of the last 50 years" (The Boston Globe)
These stories attest to the generous compass of Thomas McGuane's fellow feeling, as well as to his unique way with words. In this collection, filled with grace and humor, the ties of family make for uncomfortable binds: A devoted son is horrified to discover his mother's antics before she slipped into dementia, and a father's outdoor skills are no match for a change in the weather. But complications arise equally in the absence of blood, as when lifelong friends on a fishing trip finally confront their deep dislike for each other. Or when a gifted traveling cattle breeder succumbs to the lure of a stranger's offer of easy money.
McGuane is as witty and large-hearted as we have ever known him, and Crow Fair is a jubilant, thunderous confirmation of his status as a modern master.
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$20.00
Cloudbursts: Collected and New Stories
From the acclaimed author of Ninety-two in the Shade: Set in the seedy corners of Key West, the remote shore towns of the Bahamas, and the unforgiving landscape of Big Sky Country, a “uniformly brilliant” collection (The New York Times Book Review) of familial dysfunction, emotional failure, and American loneliness that celebrates the human ability to persist through life's absurdities
For more than four decades, Thomas McGuane has been heralded as an unrivaled master of the short story. Now the arc of that achievement appears in one definitive volume—forty-five stories, including two new and six previously uncollected pieces. These are stories of people on the fringes of society, whose twisted pasts meddle with their chances for companionship, moving from the hilarious to the tragic and back again.
“A master of the short story... Cloudbursts is clearly the product of a life's worth of thought and feeling and experience; it ought to be savored.” —The New York Times Book Review
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$19.00
Cloudbursts: Collected and New Stories
ONE OF THE WALL STREET JOURNAL'S BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR
For more than four decades, Thomas McGuane has been heralded as an unrivaled master of the short story. Now the arc of that achievement appears in one definitive volume—forty-five stories, including two new and six previously uncollected pieces. Set in the seedy corners of Key West, the remote shore towns of the Bahamas, and McGuane’s hallmark Big Sky country with its vast and unforgiving landscape, these are stories of people on the fringes of society, whose twisted pasts meddle with their chances for companionship. Moving from the hilarious to the tragic and back again, McGuane writes about familial dysfunction, emotional failure, and American loneliness, celebrating the human ability to persist through life’s absurdities.
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A Wooded Shore: And Other Stories
From the award-winning “master of the short story” (The New York Times Book Review)—nine shattering, hilarious tales of men on the outskirts of America, habituating the motels, hot dog stands, and dive bars time forgot, grappling with a world that is swiftly changing, and dreaming of a return to the wooded shores of their youth
In these nine peerless stories, a family boating trip veers into emotional disaster while very narrowly avoiding the physical; a would-be cheater hands over his car—his prized possession—for a shot with a pretty girl; a furniture magnate and his filmmaker daughter visit his impoverished hometown; a doctor’s long-ago affair returns with a bitter pill. Crackling with wry humor, shot through with both wisdom and pain, these are stories of grifters and dreamers, of the lovelorn and the lawless, stories of the ongoing dissonance between the lives we want and the lives this world will allow.
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$27.00
Crow Fair: Stories
From one of our most deeply admired storytellers, author of the richly acclaimed Gallatin Canyon, his first collection in nine years.
Set in Thomas McGuane’s accustomed Big Sky country, with its mesmeric powers, these stories attest to the generous compass of his fellow feeling, as well as to his unique way with words and the comic genius that has inspired comparison with Twain and Gogol. The ties of family make for uncomfortable binds: A devoted son is horrified to discover his mother’s antics before she slipped into dementia. A father’s outdoor skills are no match for an ominous change in the weather. But complications arise equally in the absence of blood, as when lifelong friends on a fishing trip finally confront their deep dislike for each other. Or when a gifted traveling cattle breeder succumbs to the lure of a stranger’s offer of easy money. McGuane is as witty and large-hearted as we have ever known him—a jubilant, thunderous confirmation of his status as a modern master.
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The Sporting Club
A hilarious novel about boyhood rivalries gone terribly wrong from the highly acclaimed author of Cloudbursts and Ninety-two in the Shade
Two old friends strike up an old feud filled with dangerous games on the vast preserve of their hunting club in this rollicking story of boyhood rivalries pushed to the limit.
McGuane is "a major American writer, one of the ... best of his generation" (Time magazine).
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Ninety-two in the Shade
NATIONAL BOOK AWARD NOMINEE • A stunning novel about a deadly rivalry in Key West from the acclaimed author of Cloudbursts. McGuane has constructed a novel with the impetus of a thriller and the heartbroken humor that is his distinct contribution to American prose.
Tiring of the company of junkies and burn-outs, Thomas Skelton goes home to Key West to take up a more wholesome life. But things fester in America's utter South. And Skelton's plans to become a skiff guide in the shining blue subtropical waters place him on a collision course with Nichol Dance, who has risen to the crest of the profession by dint of infallible instincts and a reputation for homicide.
"Thomas McGuane makes the page, the paragraph, the sentence itself a record of continuous imaginative activity.... He is an important as well as a brilliant novelist." —The New York Times Book Review
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$17.00
Panama
Panama is the harrowing and hilarious story of a washed-up rock star with kamikaze passion in Key West—and is widely considered to be the most autobiographical novel of one of our most important Americal writers, the author of Ninety-two in the Shade and Cloudbursts
Chester Pomeroy is a one-time rock star turned casualty of illicit substances. In the hands of Thomas McGuane, Chester's story is a high-wire act of extravagant emotion and steel-nerved prose. As he haunts Key West, pestering family, threatening a potential in-law with a .38, and attempting to crucify himself on his ex's door out of sheer lovesickness, Chester emerges as the pure archetype of the McGuane hero.
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$17.00
Nothing but Blue Skies
A ruefully funny novel of embattled manhood, set in Big Sky Country—by the highly acclaimed author of Ninety-two in the Shade and Cloudbursts, withwriting “so dazzlingly acute and seemingly effortless that it infuses Nothing but Blue Skies with exuberance and wit."—Chicago Tribune
This high-spirited and fiercely lyrical novel chronicles the fall and rise of Frank Copenhaver, a man so unhinged by his wife's departure that he finds himself ruining his business, falling in love with the wrong women, and wandering the lawns of his neighborhood, desperate for the merest glimpse of normalcy. The result is a Montana where cowboys slug it out with speculators, a cattleman's best friend may be his insurance broker, and love and fishing are the only consolations that last.
"Vibrant with the pleasures of ironic language, play and chase, and quick with broken-hearted humor."—Los Angeles Times Book Review
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Driving on the Rim
From one of America’s most acclaimed literary figures (“an important as well as brilliant novelist”—The New York Times Book Review) a major new novel that hilariously takes the pulse of our times.
The unforgettable voyager of this dark comic journey is I. B. “Berl” Pickett, M.D., the die of whose uncharmed life was probably cast as soon as his mother got the bright idea to name him after Irving Berlin. The boyhood insults to any chance of normalcy piled on apace thereafter: the traumatizing, spasmodic spectacle of Pentecostalist Sunday worship; the socially inhibitory accompaniment of his parents on their itinerant rug-shampooing business; the undue technical advancement and emotional retardation that ensued from his erotic initiation at the hands of his aunt. What would have become of this soul had he not gone to medical school, thanks to the surrogate parenting of a local physician and solitary bird hunter?
But there is meaning to life beyond professional accreditation, even in the noblest of callings. Berl’s been on a mission to find it these past few years, though with scant equipment or basis for hope. Hard to say (for the moment anyway) whether his mission has been aided or set back by his having fallen under suspicion of negligent homicide in the death of his former lover. All the same, being ostracized by virtually all his colleagues at the clinic gives him something to chew on: the reality of small-town living as total surveillance more than any semblance of fellowship, even among folks you’ve known your whole life.
Fortunately, for Berl, it doesn’t take a village. And he will find his deliverance in continuing to practice medicine one way or another, as well as in the few human connections he has made, wittingly or not, over the years. The landscape, too, will furnish a hint in what might yet prove, if not a certifiable epiphany, a semi-spiritual awakening in I. B. Pickett, M.D., the inglorious but sole hero of Thomas McGuane’s uproarious and profound exploration of the threads by which we all are hanging.
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Gallatin Canyon: Stories
A superb collection of stories—his first in twenty years—from one of our most acclaimed literary figures, whom The New York Times Book Review has called “a writer of the first magnitude.”
Place exerts the power of destiny in these ten stories of lives uncannily recognizable and unforgettably strange: a boy makes a surprising discovery skating at night on Lake Michigan; an Irish clan in Massachusetts gather at the bedside of their dying matriarch; a battered survivor of the glory days of Key West washes up on other shores. Several of the stories unfold in Big Sky country, McGuane’s signature landscape: a father tries to buy his adult son out of virginity; a convict turned cowhand finds refuge at a ranch in ruination; a couple makes a fateful drive through the perilous gorge of the title story before parting ways. McGuane’s people are seekers, beguiled by the land’s beauty and myth, compelled by the fantasy of what a locale can offer, forced to reconcile dream and truth.
The stories of Gallatin Canyon are alternately comical, dark, and poignant. Rich in the wit, compassion, and matchless language for which McGuane is celebrated, they are the work of a master.
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Gallatin Canyon: Stories (Vintage Contemporaries)
From the acclaimed author of Ninety-two in the Shade and Cloudbursts—the stories of Gallatin Canyon are rich in the wit, compassion, and matchless language for which Thomas McGuane is celebrated. Set mostly in famed Big Sky Country, McGuane brings us an "astonishing" (The New York Times Book Review) collection in which place exerts the power of destiny.
A boy makes a surprising discovery skating at night on Lake Michigan; an Irish clan in Massachusetts gather around their dying matriarch; a battered survivor of the glory days of Key West washes up on other shores. Several of the stories unfold in Big Sky country: a father tries to buy his adult son’s way out of virginity; a convict turns cowhand on a ranch; a couple makes a fateful drive through a perilous gorge. McGuane's people are seekers, beguiled by the land's beauty and myth, compelled by the fantasy of what a locale can offer, forced to reconcile dream and truth.
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Driving on the Rim: A novel (Vintage Contemporaries)
The unforgettable story of a housepainter turned doctor in Big Sky country who finds himself on a darkly funny journey to salvation in this “irrepressibly comic and optimistic” novel (The New York Times Book Review) from the acclaimed author of Ninety-two in the Shade and Cloudbursts
Berl Pickett is living in the small town of Livingston, Montana. The son of Pentecostal rug-shampooers, Pickett has never been the social toast of the town, but when he is accused of negligent homicide in the death of his former lover, he finds himself ostracized by his colleagues and realizes just how small his little village truly is. But fortunately for Berl, the very thing that sets him apart—his inability to follow the pack—proves to be his saving grace. With this inglorious hero, McGuane has created an unforgettable voyager.
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