In thirteen stories full of rope burns and brush scratches, the author of the classic Horse Tradin’ tells of the days when he made a specialty of catching wild cows. Ben K. Green calls himself a “stove-up old cowboy,” and readers of this book will learn soon enough where the broken bones came from. Green tells of his adventures with wild steers, sharing with readers the years he worked in thorny brush and canyon country delivering those animals that were too wily or too wild for the normal roundup. Finding them was hard, even dangerous, work. Few cowboys looked for such chores. Green declares, “I got real good at it, but of course in those days I didn’t know any better.”

A collection of twenty anecdotes about the Texas West, specifically tales from the corrals, livery stables and wagonyards by the old horse traders. The author is a semi-retired veterinarian.

This book is about the Custom Cowboys of Houston County. It's a hard life. We've lived our lives fighting the rain, wind & weather, while riding the brush, briers and thickets of east Texas. The men these stories are about made a living with their horses and dogs during the Jet Age. They play the most important role in the cattle industry. No way ranchers could do without them. Their jobs are penning cattle to work, de-worming, helping with their necessary vaccinations, catching wild cattle, pasture doctoring sick cattle, pulling calves, thrashing cattle out of the brush and many other things that people never think about. They also get cattle out of the backwater when rivers & creeks overflow, trailing them down highways and roads when there is no way to haul them. I, for one, am glad I got to serve the public with my services as a cowboy for all the years I did. These are my stories, plus some that have been told to me by other cowboys.

Published for devotees of the cowboy and the West, American Cowboy covers all aspects of the Western lifestyle, delivering the best in entertainment, personalities, travel, rodeo action, human interest, art, poetry, fashion, food, horsemanship, history, and every other facet of Western culture. With stunning photography and you-are-there reportage, American Cowboy immerses readers in the cowboy life and the magic that is the great American West.

Fairy tales for our times from the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Hours A poisoned apple and a monkey's paw with the power to change fate; a girl whose extraordinarily long hair causes catastrophe; a man with one human arm and one swan's wing; and a house deep in the forest, constructed of gumdrops and gingerbread, vanilla frosting and boiled sugar. In A Wild Swan and Other Tales, the people and the talismans of lands far, far away—the mythic figures of our childhoods and the source of so much of our wonder—are transformed by Michael Cunningham into stories of sublime revelation. Here are the moments that our fairy tales forgot or deliberately concealed: the years after a spell is broken, the rapturous instant of a miracle unexpectedly realized, or the fate of a prince only half cured of a curse. The Beast stands ahead of you in line at the convenience store, buying smokes and a Slim Jim, his devouring smile aimed at the cashier. A malformed little man with a knack for minor acts of wizardry goes to disastrous lengths to procure a child. A loutish and lazy Jack prefers living in his mother's basement to getting a job, until the day he trades a cow for a handful of magic beans. Reimagined by one of the most gifted storytellers of his generation, and exquisitely illustrated by Yuko Shimizu, rarely have our bedtime stories been this dark, this perverse, or this true.

A young boy, Dwight Martin, growing up in the 1960s spends the summer at his grandparents farm in North Carolina. He takes comfort in the wild yarns spun by his grandfather, who boasts that the stories are true and makes Dwight pay him to hear each successive chapter. As Dwight grows to manhood, he discounts the tall tales, but when his grandfather dies, he learns that most of the stories were true--and he finds out what the old man did with all of the nickels and dimes Dwight had paid him. Inspired in part by the raucous humor of Mark Twain and tapping into the American pop culture of the 1960s and '70s, Cow Across America is a book about the hopeful power of stories to link the generations.