John Williams
Books by John Williams
“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
Stoner
by John Williams
To me, Stoner is almost the perfect novel. Anyone who reads it is completely captivated by it. And it has nothing to do with being stoned.
Interviews where books by John Williams were recommended
The Best American Stories, recommended by Simon Winchester
Modern America is a story of expanding frontiers, says bestselling author Simon Winchester. He tells us about five novels that shed light on the social history of his adopted homeland, from the late 19th century to the Great Depression.
Forgotten Classics: The Best B-Side Books, recommended by John Plotz
New books are constantly being published. Sometimes they slip by unremarked; sometimes their impact is so enormous as to divert the flow of literature altogether. But what of those books that made a splash on arrival, but have long since disappeared from view? John Plotz, the literary scholar, has spent five years resurfacing these forgotten classics: the ‘B-side books’ that have fallen from the public consciousness.