'I haven't read a book this dark and frank and sublimely written in a while. Maybe since Cormac McCarthy's No Country for Old Men.' Alden Jones Following in the footsteps of such chroniclers of American lunacy as Cormac McCarthy; Joy Williams; and Charles Portis; Robin McLean's Pity the Beast is a mind-melting feminist Western that pins a tale of sexual violence and vengeance to a canvas stretching back to prehistory. With detours through time; space; and myth; not to mention into the mind...

Dark, profane, and hilarious, yet ultimately humane, these ten stories are the latest and best of Robin McLean's reports from the eternal battlefront that is the United States. Ranging across the continent, from Alaska to Missouri, from the flatlands to the mountains, each tale is a snapshot of the political, racial, and sexual undercurrents roiling contemporary life, and each finds a way into the nerves and blood that pulse beneath the question of how to live a decent life. Here you'll fi...

Dark, profane, and hilarious, yet ultimately humane, these ten stories are the latest and best of Robin McLean’s reports from the eternal battlefront that is the United States.Ranging across the continent, from Alaska to Missouri, from the flatlands to the mountains, each tale is a snapshot of the political, racial, and sexual undercurrents roiling contemporary life, and each finds a way into the nerves and blood that pulse beneath the question of how to live a dec...

Following in the footsteps of such chroniclers of American absurdity as Cormac McCarthy, Joy Williams, and Charles Portis, Robin McLean’s Pity the Beast is a mind-melting feminist Western that pins a tale of sexual violence and vengeance to a canvas stretching back to prehistory, sideways into legend, and off into a lonesome future.Millennia ago, Ginny’s family ranch was all grass and rock and wild horses. A thousand years hence, it’ll all be peacefully un...

The characters in these nine short stories abandon families, plot assassinations, nurse vendettas, tease, taunt, and terrorize. They retaliate for bad marriages, dream of weddings, and wait decades for lovers. How far will we go to escape to a better dream? What consequences must we face for hope and fantasy? Robin McLean's stories are strange, often disturbing and funny, and as full of foolishness and ugliness as they are of the wisdom and beauty all around us.Robin McLean...

A restorative and resonant memoir of a year in the life of an aging shepherdFor fifty years, Barbara McLean has tended a flock of Border Leicester sheep on her small Ontario farm, Lambsquarters. In Shepherd's Sight she shares the crises, pleasures, and challenges of farm life over the course of a year. Now in her seventies, McLean faces a new problem: how much longer she can continue with the physically taxing work that is her central source of meaning and...