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Original Title:	Butcher's Crossing
ISBN:	1590171985 (ISBN13: 9781590171981)
Edition Language:	English
Setting:	Butchers' Crossing, Kansas(United States)

Butcher's Crossing Paperback | Pages: 274 pages

Describe Based On Books Butcher's Crossing

Title	:	Butcher's Crossing
Author	:	John Williams
Book Format	:	Paperback
Book Edition	:	Anniversary Edition
Pages	:	Pages: 274 pages
Published	:	January 16th 2007 by NYRB Classics (first published 1960)
Categories	:	Fiction. Westerns. Historical. Historical Fiction. Classics. Novels. Literature. American

Narration Toward Books Butcher's Crossing

In his National Book Award–winning novel Augustus, John Williams uncovered the secrets of ancient Rome. With Butcher’s Crossing, his fiercely intelligent, beautifully written western, Williams dismantles the myths of modern America. It is the 1870s, and Will Andrews, fired up by Emerson to seek “an original relation to nature,” drops out of Harvard and heads west. He washes up in Butcher’s Crossing, a small Kansas town on the outskirts of nowhere. Butcher’s Crossing is full of restless men looking for ways to make money and ways to waste it. Before long Andrews strikes up a friendship with one of them, a man who regales Andrews with tales of immense herds of buffalo, ready for the taking, hidden away in a beautiful valley deep in the Colorado Rockies. He convinces Andrews to join in an expedition to track the animals down. The journey out is grueling, but at the end is a place of paradisal richness. Once there, however, the three men abandon themselves to an orgy of slaughter, so caught up in killing buffalo that they lose all sense of time. Winter soon overtakes them: they are snowed in. Next spring, half-insane with cabin fever, cold, and hunger, they stagger back to Butcher’s Crossing to find a world as irremediably changed as they have been.

Rating Based On Books Butcher's Crossing

Ratings: 4.12 From 12330 Users | 1197 Reviews

Assessment Based On Books Butcher's Crossing

I enjoyed this sparse and dark novel set in Kansas and Colorado in the period after the Civil War.Strong characterisation and very atmospheric.This is Moby Dick brought to a rapidly changing American West.A precursor to the novels of Cormac McCarthy.

I started this book thinking I was getting into an adventure/survivalist tale of buffalo hunters in the old west. I turned the last page knowing that, instead, it was an epic tragedy. If you can read this book without having your stomach turned at the senseless slaughter of these animals, you're a stronger person than I am. "A long, narrow valley, flat as the top of a table, wound among the mountains. Lush grass grew on the bed of the valley, and waved gently in the breeze as far as the eye

It feels strange to say such a raw and even grubby book such a delight. While deeply unsettling in the end with the main character a changed nomad it is a perfect book for its pitch and character dynamics. As I sit on a little plane flying back from Norther NSW looking at a world of fluffy clouds I think of the snowed in scenes of Butchers Crossing and the scene of white blindness. Williams is a fabulous writer. I have only read a little poetry but his awe of nature reminds me of Gerard Manley

Reading this book was like watching an archer shoot an arrow but in an ultra slow motion.Like watching those eyes squint at the target, the shooting arm pulling back the arrow while slowly building up the power in the tightening muscles, keeping the spectator transfixed and waiting for the moment of truth. And then it comes. The release of the arrow sans any blasting sound. Swoosh. Bull's eye.Yep, John Williams can pull a punch. That too with glorious simplicity. You realize later that you have

Why read a historical novel about a privileged Harvard dropout who wants to find himself by going on a buffalo hunt? 1. It's by John Williams, who wrote one of my three favourite novels, Stoner, which I reviewed HERE, as well as his masterpiece, Augustus, which I reviewed HERE.2. Hunting is not what it's really about (probably like Moby Dick?).3. It was a good follow-on from Cold Mountain, which I reviewed HERE: two totally different US landscape-based stories, set only a few years apart.What

There are parts of Butcher's Crossing that remind me of another book or story, or maybe it is actual history I think of. It's the go west, young man, kind of saying that you've probably heard at some point yourself. The young man's name in this story is Andrews. His reasoning at this time in his life is the same as many others have been and will be: abandon the former life and future for the open and untamed West that calls to him. My synopsis of Andrews' initial plight is quite up to par to his

John 'Stoner' Williams' bleak and unromantic portrait of the great myth of the Western Frontier is a hard edged read designed to repulse the reader with its content whilst wallowing in the majesty of nature. It's no mean feat to capture such beauty and such horror in one novel with equal skill and success, in doing so Williams confirms his place in my heart as one the greats of American letters, and if justice is served all of us who care for the careful consideration of how one word follows