Featuring the winning entries from the Owl Canyon Press Short Story Hackathon No. 3, chosen from 1100+ entries received from 40 countries.

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • The triumphant true story of a woman who rode her horse across America in the 1950s, fulfilling her dying wish to see the Pacific Ocean, from the #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Perfect Horse and The Eighty-Dollar Champion “The gift Elizabeth Letts has is that she makes you feel you are the one taking this trip. This is a book we can enjoy always but especially need now.”—Elizabeth Berg, author of The Story of Arthur Truluv In 1954, sixty-three-year-old Maine farmer Annie Wilkins embarked on an impossible journey. She had no money and no family, she had just lost her farm, and her doctor had given her only two years to live. But Annie wanted to see the Pacific Ocean before she died. She ignored her doctor’s advice to move into the county charity home. Instead, she bought a cast-off brown gelding named Tarzan, donned men’s dungarees, and headed south in mid-November, hoping to beat the snow. Annie had little idea what to expect beyond her rural crossroads; she didn’t even have a map. But she did have her ex-racehorse, her faithful mutt, and her own unfailing belief that Americans would treat a stranger with kindness. Annie, Tarzan, and her dog, Depeche Toi, rode straight into a world transformed by the rapid construction of modern highways. Between 1954 and 1956, the three travelers pushed through blizzards, forded rivers, climbed mountains, and clung to the narrow shoulder as cars whipped by them at terrifying speeds. Annie rode more than four thousand miles, through America’s big cities and small towns. Along the way, she met ordinary people and celebrities—from Andrew Wyeth (who sketched Tarzan) to Art Linkletter and Groucho Marx. She received many offers—a permanent home at a riding stable in New Jersey, a job at a gas station in rural Kentucky, even a marriage proposal from a Wyoming rancher. In a decade when car ownership nearly tripled, when television’s influence was expanding fast, when homeowners began locking their doors, Annie and her four-footed companions inspired an outpouring of neighborliness in a rapidly changing world.

After riding 16,000 kilometers from Canada through ten countries to his home in Brazil, the Long Rider, Filipe Masetti Leite's life fell apart. So, what does he do? Saddle up and ride on, of course. In this second volume in his Journey America trilogy, Filipe shares his fifteen-month adventure riding six horses from Barretos, Brazil, across three more countries, through windswept deserts, frozen mountains, and a scorched Patagonian landscape to Tierra del Fuego, the Land of Fire. His path from the brave cowboy hero who arrived in Brazil in his book Long Ride Home is now a dark journey inward. Long Ride to the End of the Earth is a story of heartbreak and family, life and death, pain and love. His heart carries the great sadness of a father who has lost his son. At the same time, there is new hope in the passion he discovers meeting his flor del pago in the middle of the desert. Through it all, everyday heroes provide help and hope as Filipe and his horses complete another impossible odyssey. "An incredible adventure about Western culture, resiliency, and community spirit." - Dana Peers, President of the Calgary Stampede, who chose Filipe as the 2020 Parade Marshal. Filipe's first book, Long Ride Home, will soon be a major motion picture. The children of the Barretos Children's Cancer Hospital (Hospital de Amor) are his inspiration for this journey.

Poems of love and loss, life and death, screams and silence and through it all the heart whispers still.