His background is shadowy, his presence commanding. He brings law and order to a frontier town and wins the love of a pretty schoolteacher from the East. He is the Virginian—the first fully realized cowboy hero in American literature, a near-mythic figure whose idealized image has profoundly influenced our national consciousness. This enduring work of fiction marks his first appearance in popular culture—the birth of a legend that lives with us still.

Straightforward steps to:• Getting started the right way • Avoiding common pitfalls • Eliminating rejection slips • Getting checks in the mailSlim Randles has been a journalist, editor, author, sportsman, and speaker. After years of making a living from the pen, he is passing on advice to those who want to write for a living. Slim’s advice is spiced up with his signature view of what the world is and could be. This book is filled with an award-winning author’s gentle but firm words to live...

Legendary western author Max Evans has spent his entire life working with cows and horses. These rangeland animals, and other creatures both domestic and wild, play pivotal roles in his stories. This magnificent collection, beautifully illustrated by cowboy artist Keith Walters, showcases twenty-six animal tales penned by Evans during his long and celebrated career.Both fiction and nonfiction, the stories in this collection get us inside the heads and hearts of numerous four-legged...

From 2004 to 2009, the Albuquerque Journal North ran the ¡ÓRALE! SANTA FE column by Santa Fe native and veteran journalist Arnold Vigil. The editor gave carte blanche to Vigil in his selection of topics ranging from encounters with locals and tourists to social commentary about changes that have taken place over the years. Vigil’s local perspective and humorous insights about Santa Fe, its inhabitants, and visitors struck a chord with readers—native Nuevomexicanos and long-time residents a...

There's eight million stories in the naked city but billions more around the world from the COVID-19 pandemic. This is one of a man stripped down to nothing to realize what matters most.Escape to Butterfly Ave is a coming-of-age dramedy that highlights a skateboarder-turned-father striving to maintain a bond with his teething daughter during the Covid era. Throughout this fateful weekend, numerous challenges ramp for Al, including a brawl with his drug-dea...

At its heart, The Hi Lo Country is the story of the friendship between two men, their mutual love of a woman, and their allegiance to the harsh, dry, achingly beautiful New Mexico high-desert grassland. The story is told by Pete, a young ranch hand, whose best friend is Big Boy Matson. Together they drink, gamble, fight, work, and rodeo. They both fall hard for a married woman—the attractive, bored, and dangerous Mona.When it was first published in 1961, the novel was both...

Winner of the 2021 Western Heritage Award for Outstanding Western NovelMax Evans' wit and humanity sparkle in the guise of a humorous cast of characters set in the underworld of Taos, New Mexico, in the 1950s.The underground world of con men, winos, prostitutes, laborers, and artists has been an abundant source of material for great writers from Dickens to Bukowski. The underground world of Taos, New Mexico, is no different. In the...

Born in New Mexico at the end of World War I, Bluefeather Fellini is half-Pueblo Indian and half-Italian. Throughout his life, Bluefeather enjoys roaming and seeking his fortunes elsewhere, but he is always drawn back to Taos, the home of his Indian mother. During times of danger, he is visited by Dancing Bear, his spirit guide, who interjects ageless humor into situations when needed. And his Aunt Tulip Everhaven usually has a brew made from sagebrush that helps Bluefeather put his troubl...

Ty Hale, a young corporal from Lovington, New Mexico, finds himself alone in the middle of a grain field in Normandy after being knocked unconscious by the explosion of a German artillery shell. Stunned from the explosion and overwhelmed by visions of the grandfather who raised him and the simple life of the New Mexico prairie he has left behind, Ty attempts to rejoin his unit but instead stumbles onto a country estate and inextricably into the lives of its inhabitants.Philippe Gas...

The bawdy and moving story of two contemporary bronco busters, The Rounders, originally published in 1960, was Max Evans's first novel and is still his best known work, thanks largely to the success of the 1965 movie version starring Henry Fonda and Glenn Ford. Acclaimed for its realistic depiction of modern cowboying and for its humor, it is also a very serious work, described by the author as a tragicomedy.It is a book to read if you are in need of a good laugh or if you...

In his eighty-plus years, Max Evans has known, owned, ridden, and been thrown by quite a number of horses. In For the Love of a Horse, Evans shares his favorite horse stories for all to enjoy. As Max explains, I wanted a wide range of adventures from another time, with different horses, of different breeds, and a sense of history of those special days.Max begins with his first horse, Cricket, which he received when he was four years old. At the age of ten, he helped with a...

First published in 1999, Faraway Blue is based on the real-life exploits of Sergeant Moses Williams, former slave, Civil War veteran, and Buffalo Soldier in the Ninth Cavalry Regiment. Included in Moses's story are four women and two men representing the ethnic groups and economic levels found in the late 1800s American Southwest.At the story's opening, Williams's cavalry unit has one assignment: kill Apaches in the faraway blue mountains of southwestern New Mexico Territo...