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Buffalo Bones

J. Robert Lennon: Larry McMurtry’s American West, 4 June 2026

Larry McMurtryA Life 
by Tracy Daugherty.
St Martin’s, 550 pp., £18.99, July 2025, 978 1 250 35458 7
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Lonesome Dove 
by Larry McMurtry.
Picador, 865 pp., £12.99, June 2025, 978 1 5290 9994 2
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Streets of Laredo 
by Larry McMurtry.
Picador, 499 pp., £12.99, June 2025, 978 1 5290 9997 3
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Dead Man’s Walk 
by Larry McMurtry.
Picador, 429 pp., £12.99, June 2025, 978 1 5290 9996 6
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Comanche Moon 
by Larry McMurtry.
Picador, 668 pp., £12.99, June 2025, 978 1 5290 9995 9
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... For many years​ I held certain assumptions about Larry McMurtry. Without ever having read his novels, I thought of him as a prolific – perhaps excessively prolific – author of sentimental bestsellers, most of them sequels or prequels to earlier successes. I knew that a few good movies had been adapted from his work, but had mentally classified him alongside Sidney Sheldon, Colleen McCullough and John Jakes, writers of great popular appeal in my youth, whose moment had passed and whose work was unlikely to be revisited ...

Short Cuts

Tom Crewe: Dickens and Prince, 5 January 2023

... me think about my own work’. Hornby’s list is erratic, as anyone’s would be, running from Larry McMurtry through to Barbra Streisand and Arsène Wenger. But two figures stand out, and, he thinks, justify direct comparison. Dickens and Prince: A Particular Kind of Genius (Viking, £9.99) is a book that, far from crying out to be written, was ...

On Gertrude Beasley

Elisabeth Ladenson, 21 October 2021

... For decades it has been almost impossible to find. In 1989, with Beasley’s fate still a mystery, Larry McMurtry encouraged the Book Club of Texas to bring out an edition of five hundred copies for which he wrote an afterword. Most of these are now in libraries in Texas. As early as 1934, Beasley’s original publisher, Robert McAlmon, was complaining ...

Bounty Hunter

John Sutherland, 17 July 1997

Riders of the Purple Sage 
by Zane Grey.
Oxford, 265 pp., £4.99, May 1995, 0 19 282443 0
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The Man of the Forest: The Authorised Version 
by Zane Grey.
Nebraska, 383 pp., $15, September 1996, 0 8032 7062 3
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The Thundering Herd: The Authorised Version 
by Zane Grey.
Nebraska, 400 pp., $16, September 1996, 0 8032 7065 8
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... are, and despite the recent successes of ‘literary’ writers who have used the genre (notably Larry McMurtry and Cormac McCarthy), the Western still awaits its Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, Kurt Vonnegut, or even its Georgette Heyer: that is, the writer capable of lifting its clichés into art. Elmore Leonard might have done it, had he not ...

In the Cybersweatshop

Christian Lorentzen: Pynchon Dotcom, 26 September 2013

Bleeding Edge 
by Thomas Pynchon.
Cape, 477 pp., £20, September 2013, 978 0 224 09902 8
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... flickered for a few years and then burned out. In his memoir Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen, Larry McMurtry writes: ‘There circulated, in the Sixties, the legend that Thomas Pynchon read only the Encyclopaedia Britannica; it was even said that much of the erudition in V. came out of the N-O volume of that great work.’ There’s erudition in ...

Mad to Be Saved

Thomas Powers: The Kerouac Years, 25 October 2012

The Voice Is All: The Lonely Victory of Jack Kerouac 
by Joyce Johnson.
Viking, 489 pp., £25, September 2012, 978 0 670 02510 7
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... and thereby gave the book its structure of quest. Some readers – the novelist and essayist Larry McMurtry, for example – like the scroll better, but odds are the scroll would have remained unpublished, or unread if printed, or dismissed if read, which is roughly what happened to the later books. The rewrite came later, however, when Glassman was ...

All That Gab

James Wolcott: The Upsides of Sontag’s Downsides, 24 October 2019

Sontag: Her Life 
by Benjamin Moser.
Allen Lane, 832 pp., £30, September 2019, 978 0 241 00348 0
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... as Joan of Arc was the same woman who ate so much caviar at Petrossian on 58th Street that, Larry McMurtry said, she ‘decimated the species’. A series of movies and bestsellers had made him rich, and Susan took full advantage of his good fortune. One evening, his flight from Washington was delayed, and when he got to the restaurant, the maitre ...

Tacky Dress

Dale Peck, 22 February 1996

Like People in History: A Gay American Epic 
by Felice Picano.
Viking, 512 pp., $23.95, July 1995, 0 670 86047 6
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How Long Has This Been Going On? 
by Ethan Mordden.
Villard, 590 pp., $25, April 1995, 0 679 41529 7
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The Facts of Life 
by Patrick Gale.
Flamingo, 511 pp., £15.99, June 1995, 0 602 24522 2
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Flesh and Blood 
by Michael Cunningham.
Hamish Hamilton, 480 pp., £14.99, June 1995, 9780241135150
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... any attack on that hedonism as the ultimate affront to their political and personal freedom – Larry Kramer remarked that just staying alive had become a political act for gay men. A few years before the plague appeared, in 1978, Kramer had risen to prominence – and controversy – on the new wave of gay literature with his novel Faggots. Fiction with ...

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