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...

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 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...

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...

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...

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 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 ...

Whether you are a career serviceman or woman, or serving for a term, you and your family face many hardships that meet you head-on. Your mental, spiritual, and physical state will be challenged, and you will incur many difficulties that you must overcome. Some of the challenges also come from the communities and countries you serve in.While serving, your faith in God may be questioned and your attitude toward your faith could be compromised by a myriad of difficult situations. This...

The Write Side Up: Stories by Chris Bartholomew, K. Kellogg Smith, Craig Terlson, Stewart Sumner, Walker R. Singleton, Mark Terence Chapman, Sandra Cox, Saulander Evans, Darryl L. Wylie, Darrell E. Bottoms, Nonnie Augustine, Marjorie McKinney, Matt Maxwell, Sherry Allyn Norman, Christopher Morrow, Joel M. Fine, Joshua D. Dinman, and Michael Leone.• Letter from the Publisher• Creditso C. W. Smitho Jennifer Rudeo Saulander Evanso Joel M. Fine...

Losing FaceWhat would happen if you were in a bad accident, your face was burned beyond recognition, and the doctors put a new face on for you? What would happen if your memory was gone too? Now you are indirectly connected to a suicide or is it a homicide, mistaken identity and just when your life starts falling back into place all hell breaks loose.Bug KillerGreg thought he just struck gold as he headed home with his prize. He originally went to Loews to buy some 'L...

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...