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Book Reviews on...

Butcher's Crossing by John Williams
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Butcher's Crossing

by John Williams

Recommendations from our site

“Butcher’s Crossing is a Western in that it’s about a buffalo hunt. A young man from Boston shows up in the last town in Kansas, and says he wants to go hunt buffalo. Since it dates from 1960, you might think of it as the world of late Zane Grey—a time when people are making a lot of great Westerns still, the High Noon era. But it’s an anti-Western. The point of the novel is that the very things you do that you think are going to make you a man, that are going to bring you into this wonderful, new, transcendent Emersonian relationship with nature… well you’re just killing buffalo. You’re killing them and killing them and killing them. At some point you realise that the glory is the obscenity.” Read more...

Forgotten Classics: The Best B-Side Books

John Plotz, Literary Scholar

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