Westerns @ BPL - Zane Grey

Celebrate Rodeo Week in Brooks with the Brooks Public Library.  This week we’re introducing you to the Westerns genre and showing you titles and authors that you may be missing out on.

Zane Grey (January 31, 1872 - October 23, 1939) was an American author of popular adventure novels and pulp fiction that presented an idealized image of the rugged Old West. He became interested in this ideal after joining a friend on an expedition to trap mountain lions in Arizona in 1907. Grey wrote steadily, but it was only in 1910, and after considerable efforts by his wife, that his first western, Heritage of the Desert, became a bestseller. It propelled a career churning out popular novels about manifest destiny and the "conquest of the Wild West." He became one of the first millionaire authors. Over the years his habit was to spend part of the year traveling and living an adventurous life and the rest of the year using his adventures as the basis for the stories in his writings. Zane Grey died in 1939 and was interred at the Union Cemetery in Lackawaxen, Pennsylvania, where the National Park Service maintains the Zane Grey Museum.

Grey’s works helped to influence the Westerns genre in fiction, and many writers still style their writing after his books. If you’re interesting in getting into Westerns, check out these books by Zane Grey today.

Westerns @ BPL - The Last Crossing

Celebrate Rodeo Week in Brooks with the Brooks Public Library. This week we’re introducing you to the Westerns genre and showing you titles and authors that you may be missing out on.

If you’re looking for an unconventional western, you may want to try The Last Crossing by GuyVanderhaeghe.

Set in the second half of the nineteenth century, in the American and Canadian West and in Victorian England, The Last Crossing is a sweeping tale of interwoven lives and stories

Charles and Addington Gaunt must find their brother Simon, who has gone missing in the wilds of the American West. Charles, a disillusioned artist, and Addington, a disgraced military captain, enlist the services of a guide to lead them on their journey across a difficult and unknown landscape. This is the enigmatic Jerry Potts, half Blackfoot, half Scottish, who suffers his own painful past. The party grows to include Caleb Ayto, a sycophantic American journalist, and Lucy Stoveall, a wise and beautiful woman who travels in the hope of avenging her sister’s vicious murder. Later, the group is joined by Custis Straw, a Civil War veteran searching for salvation, and Custis’s friend and protector Aloysius Dooley, a saloon-keeper. This unlikely posse becomes entangled in an unfolding drama that forces each person to come to terms with his own demons.

The Last Crossing contains many haunting scenes – among them, a bear hunt at dawn, the meeting of a Métis caravan, the discovery of an Indian village decimated by smallpox, a sharpshooter’s devastating annihilation of his prey, a young boy’s last memory of his mother. Vanderhaeghe links the hallowed colleges of Oxford and the pleasure houses of London to the treacherous Montana plains; and the rough trading posts of the Canadian wilderness to the heart of Indian folklore. At the novel’s centre is an unusual and moving love story.

The Last Crossing is Guy Vanderhaeghe’s most powerful novel to date. It is a novel of harshness and redemption, an epic masterpiece, rich with unforgettable characters and vividly described events, which solidify his place as one of Canada’s premier storytellers. It is available for checkout now from the Brooks Public Library.

Westerns @ BPL - Elmore Leonard

Celebrate Rodeo Week in Brooks with the Brooks Public Library. This week we’re introducing you to the Westerns genre and showing you titles and authors that you may be missing out on.

Elmore Leonard began his writing career penning westerns, but went on to also write crime fiction and thrillers. Many of his works have been turned into feature films, including his most famous short-story 3:10 to Yuma.

His stories are must reads for any western fan and are available for check out now from the Brooks Public Library.

Westerns @ BPL - Appaloosa

Celebrate Rodeo Week in Brooks with the Brooks Public Library. This week we’re introducing you to the Westerns genre and showing you titles and authors that you may be missing out on.

Readers looking for a western written by a contemporary author may be interested in reading Robert B. Parker’s Appaloosa. In this story, Virgil Cole and Everett Hitch arrive in Appaloosa to find a small, dusty town suffering at the hands of a renegade rancher Randall Bragg, a man who has so little regard for the law that he has taken supplies, horses and women for his own and left the city marshal and one of his deputies for dead. Cole and Hitch, itinerant lawmen, are used to cleaning up after opportunistic thieves, but in Bragg they find an unusually wily adversary- one who raises the stakes by playing not with the rules, but with emotions.

Written in 2005, this book also became a feature film starring Ed Harris, Viggo Mortensen, Renée Zellweger and Jeremy Irons. This book was also followed by three more books about Hitch and Cole – Resolution, Brimstone, and Blue-Eyed Devil. You can find these books available for check out from the Brooks Public Library.

Westerns @ BPL - Louis L'Amour

Celebrate Rodeo Week in Brooks with the Brooks Public Library. This week we’re introducing you to the Westerns genre and showing you titles and authors that you may be missing out on.

What is a ‘Western’? The western genre comprises of stories set in the latter half of the 1800’s in the American Old West, hence the name. Some Westerns are set as early as the Battle of the Alamo in 1836. Westerns often portray how difficult life was for frontier families. Reoccurring stock characters include solitary cowboys, U.S. cavalry soldiers, and indigenous peoples of North America.

Today’s western selection is perfect for readers who are new to the western genre. In his time, Louis L’Amour was considered one of the world’s most popular authors, and was most famous for his western stories – or as he liked to call them, ‘Frontier Stories’. Born in 1908, many of his 105 stories were turned into feature films and continued to be published today.

If you’re considering reading a western, you may one to try one of Louis L’Amour’s many books. To help get you started, here’s a list of his works available from the Brooks Public Library.

You can read more about the life of Louis L’Amour on his official website.