"The Wister Trace: Second Edition" will be a work of literary criticism consisting of the twenty-nine original essays on classic western novels found in the first edition and additional essays of commentary and criticism on such authors as Larry McMurtry, Cormack McCarthy, Willa Cather, Jane Smiley, St. Clair Robson, Dorothy Johnson, Margaret Coel, Tony Hillerman, Richard Wheeler, and Don Coldsmith. The new edition will consist of at least 25% new material. This new edition serves as a unique and informative critique of western fiction authors and offers a much updated version of the original"--

""The Wister Trace: Second Edition" will be a work of literary criticism consisting of the twenty-nine original essays on classic western novels found in the first edition and additional essays of commentary and criticism on such authors as Larry McMurtry, Cormack McCarthy, Willa Cather, Jane Smiley, St. Clair Robson, Dorothy Johnson, Margaret Coel, Tony Hillerman, Richard Wheeler, and Don Coldsmith. The new edition will consist of at least 25% new material. This new edition serves as a unique and informative critique of western fiction authors and offers a much updated version of the original"-- Provided by publisher.

Shoot: the latest in Loren D. Estleman's Valentino mysteries! Valentino, a mild-manner film archivist at UCLA and sometime film detective, is at the closing party for the Red Montana and Dixie Day museum when he is approached by no less than his hero and man-of-the-hour Red Montana, western film and television star. Red tells Valentino that he is being blackmailed over the existence of a blue film that his wife, now known throughout the world as the wholesome Dixie Day and the other half of the Montana/Day power couple, made early in her career. With Dixie on her deathbed, Red is desperate to save her the embarrassment of the promised scandal, and offers Valentino a deal-find the movie, and he can have Red's lost film, Sixgun Sonata, that Red has been hiding away in his archives. Don't accept, and the priceless reel will go up in flames. Feeling blackmailed himself, Valentino agrees and begins to dig. In the surreal world of Hollywood, what is on screen is rarely reality. As he races to uncover the truth before time runs out, his heroes begin their fall from grace. Valentino desperately wants to save Sixgun Sonata...but at what cost?

At every turn in the development of what we now know as the western, women writers have been instrumental in its formation. Yet the myth that the western is male-authored persists. Westerns: A Women’s History debunks this myth once and for all by recovering the women writers of popular westerns who were active during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries when the western genre as we now know it emerged. Victoria Lamont offers detailed studies of some of the many women who helped shape the western. Their novels bear the classic hallmarks of the western—cowboys, schoolmarms, gun violence, lynchings, cattle branding—while also placing female characters at the center of their western adventures and improvising with western conventions in surprising and ingenious ways. In Emma Ghent Curtis’s The Administratrix a widow disguises herself as a cowboy and infiltrates the cowboy gang responsible for lynching her husband. Muriel Newhall’s pulp serial character, Sheriff Minnie, comes to the rescue of a steady stream of defenseless female victims. B. M. Bower, Katharine Newlin Burt, and Frances McElrath use cattle branding as a metaphor for their feminist critiques of patriarchy. In addition to recovering the work of these and other women authors of popular westerns, Lamont uses original archival analysis of the western-fiction publishing scene to overturn the long-standing myth of the western as a male-dominated genre.

"Marcus Klein makes major contributions to American studies, literary criticism, and intellectual and social history. In a perfectly crystalline and crystallized way, he brilliantly exhibits how the American imagination was rapidly, unexpectedly, and utterly transformed as we made for the twentieth century. Klein demonstrates how immigration, popular literature, the rise of ethnicity, new psychological fears, and old fables mixed together to make modern America. No one has seen the underside of the American imagination so clearly and originally; but once we are allowed to see what Klein does, our understanding of our history and its vicissitudes is changed for good."--Jay Martin, University of Southern California