C.W. Smith's award-winning first novel, Thin Men of Haddam, established him as a novelist of power and compassion, and Country Music offers up a shrewd anatomy of sexual and social stances that extends the range and depth of his vision. Country Music opens when Bobby Joe Gilbert, Hedorville's Bane to Virgins and Most Unlikely to Succeed, confronts an unwelcome question: "What are you going to do with yourself?" Desperate to escape his reputation and the limitations of his world, he makes a...

In the mode of such humorists Bill Bryson and David Sedaris, C.W. Smith's essays in A Throttled Peacock - Observations on the Old World take a droll and ironic look at the antics of Europeans at home and Americans abroad in this off-beat memoir that gently mocks both traveler and host. In an Oxford University lecture hall, a local mayor wearing a flamboyant ceremonial necklace sets off Smith's wry meditation on the English love of tradition; in Geneva he learns that a companion with whom y...

Named “best novel” by the Texas Institute of Letters, C.W. Smith’s Understanding Women is the hilarious and moving account of a teenage boy’s encounters in the prickly thicket of adult domestic difficulties. When James (Jimbo) Proctor gets an offer from his Uncle Waylan to spend a summer working in the oil fields as a roustabout to earn the cash for a car, he happily agrees. But when he arrives in the small New Mexico town, he finds that his uncle and aunt are living apart. He and his uncl...

In the tradition of Lonesome Dove, C. W. Smith's novel Buffalo Nickel is a sprawling saga of love and money based on the real life of a man known to the press in the 1920s as "the world's richest Indian." When oil was struck on his Oklahoma farm in in 1917, a Kiowa called David Copperfield by his missionary teachers became an millionaire overnight and so began to live out the destiny implied by his Indian name, Went On A Journey. From his childhood in the tamed West (where buffalo are impo...

When first published in hard cover, C.W. Smith’s Hunter’s Trap was praised by Kirkus Reviews as a "Beautifully bitter Depression-era revenge melodrama in which good guys lose, good women die, and virtue's reward is unreasonable tragedy." The novel, set in El Paso in 1930, follows on Smith’s highly praised Buffalo Nickel both as a sequel and a stand-alone noir-ish thriller in the mode of James M. Cain and Jim Thompson. Believing that his late wife was collateral damage in a greedy plot to m...

C.W. Smith’s hit novel The Vestal Virgin Room, now available in ebook formats, is a tragi-comic love story about a married couple and the agonies and ecstasies of being hitched through thick and thin. Don and Dottie Baxter are a husband-and-wife musical duo (both sing while she’s at the piano and he’s on drums) who’ve never made the big-time, but as the novel opens, they’re about to get their shot playing the intermissions at a Vegas lounge called The Vestal Virgin Room. They hope their tu...

When Letters From the Horse Latitudes, C.W. Smith’s first collection of short fiction, appeared in print, they were praised in The New York Times for their “rugged informality” and for a “sense of intimacy… so great that the reader feels he has uncovered a cache of personal letters or is overhearing a late-night conversation between friends.” Set in the American Southwest and in Mexico, the central motif of the “horse latitudes” – a huge, perpetually becalmed area of the Atlantic dreaded a...

This bold Southwestern tale by award-winning author C.W. Smith comes from the TCU Press' Texas Tradition Series. Raised by an Anglo family after being orphaned, MEndez has been given the chance to succeed. His cousin Manuelo, however, is struggling just to survive. When Manuelo breaks the law, MEndez must decide whether to continue living a comfortable life or to risk it all and fight for his kin. ". a sympathetic and fairly subtle study of the intellectual who straddles the line between r...

When nineteen-year-old aviatrix Katie Burke crash lands her biplane on the only street in No Name, New Mexico, her arrival changes her life and the lives of everyone around her. As Katie and her craft need repair, locals take her in and help her, including a schoolteacher who longs for Katie's friendship, an interracial couple who own the town's diner, a handsome young mechanic who lives in a teepee, and a shell-shocked veteran of World War I.As her story unfolds, Katie's mysteries...

The second volume of collected short fiction from the New York Times bestselling author of The Tortilla Curtain, featuring fifty-eight short stories that “mix brilliance with high-concept pyrotechnics” (Los Angeles Times), including fourteen never-before-published tales“Whether he’s writing about survival in a wasted environment or people and animals coming unhinged, Boyle never fails to captivate, to deliver his ideas within the ...

Women, funerals, guns, and rattlesnakes. What could go wrong?Jill OHara, award-winning journalist and inveterate egotist, is about to find out. When Jill is summoned to her hometown Prairie View, Montana, to bury her father and clean up his messes, she assumes a few tedious days of signing papers and delegating responsibilities will complete her obligations. But Jills duties as Dean OHaras daughter soon become less mundane and more menacing. To complicate matters, Jills first love,...

A pottery mystery that's "perfectly delightful and funny . . . full of engaging characters, fast dialogue, and tasty descriptions of the New Mexico culture" ( Kings River Life Magazine).Eighty years ago, D. H. Lawrence moved to Taos to make a home for himself in the mountains of New Mexico. To welcome the famed writer, his neighbor brought over a stew and left the container as a gift. But this was no Tupperware—it was a handcrafted pot made in the ancient ...