Western Fiction

Harold Bloom explores our Western literary tradition by concentrating on the works of twenty-six authors central to the Canon. He argues against ideology in literary criticism; he laments the loss of intellectual and aesthetic standards; he deplores multiculturalism, Marxism, feminism, neoconservatism, Afrocentrism, and the New Historicism. Insisting instead upon "the autonomy of aesthetic," Bloom places Shakespeare at the center of the Western Canon.....

A cowboy is just a man with guts and a horse. Connor Mills is only trying to earn some summer money for school by working the Green River Drift cattle drive in Wyoming. The Fates have something else in mind for him. Thrust into a dark realm both familiar and eerily twisted, Connor finds himself at the center of a struggle between goblin tycoons, corrupt wolf-kin lawmen, and a town full of people who’ve had all the hope wrung out of them.

Bullets rip the air, snapping past Clay Barlow’s head as, riding Blue, he charges a band of robbers surrounding the Austin stagecoach. Clay lets loose with a load of buckshot from his 12-gauge Roper Repeating Shotgun. With his third blast, the robbers turn tail and race off into the Texas hill country, leaving one of their own dying in the hot Texas dust. At 18, Clay has been invited to join the Texas Rangers. Now, he rides to Austin to either put on the Rangers’ badge or fight for the law in Texas courts, fulfilling his parents' wish that he become an attorney.

South Texas, 1854. Regis Royle is determined to turn eighteen-thousand acres of raw prairie into the greatest cattle ranch in the world. But he can’t do it alone. The region is wilder than a herd of mustangs—and crawling with rustlers. Teaming up with the Cattlemen’s Justice Consortium, Regis hopes to stop the rustling and start laying tracks for a new railway. Problem is, the cattlemen—including Jarvis “Bone” McGraw, Regis’s own ranch manager—can’t help but lock horns with the Texas Rangers. And it doesn’t take long for this brewing pot of very bad blood to get a whole lot worse.

Cuddle up with a cowboy and enjoy these great, heartwarming and inspirational stories of love and laughter under the wide, North Dakota sky!

When Drew Campbell turned sixteen and had to leave St. Thomas Home for Boys, he knew he wasn’t fully prepared to face the world on his own. But he thought his years as a blacksmith’s apprentice would give him a start. But after failing to find work at any of the town’s smithies, Drew traveled to Brainerd and found work in the Northern Pacific’s maintenance yard as a common laborer. He was eighteen when he met pretty Anne McDuff and wanted to prove himself to her father. So, he volunteered for the well-paying job as a brakeman.

When her husband dies, leaving Sarah Perry and her infant daughter destitute and alone in the rough frontier town, the determined widow takes over his freight-hauling business. As her baby grows into a young girl, Sarah sends her to the safety and refinement of a boarding school. But when they are reunited, Sarah realizes that they now live in two different, incompatible worlds. Too Long a Stranger follows this courageous widow as she tries to regain a loving relationship with her estranged daughter.

Award-winning author Craig Johnson's critically acclaimed debut Western mystery takes listeners to the breathtaking mountains of Wyoming for a tale of cold-blooded vengeance. Four high-school boys were given suspended sentences for raping a Cheyenne girl. Now, two of the boys have been killed, and only Sheriff Walt Longmire can keep the other two safe.

The Clayborne brothers were a rough gang of street urchins - until they found an abandoned baby girl in a New York City alley, named her Mary Rose, and headed to Blue Belle, Montana, to raise her to be a lady. They became a family - held together by loyalty and love, if not blood - when suddenly a stranger threatened to tear them apart.

Lilly Preston took a leap of faith and moved to Gracely a year ago to save her nephew from an abusive situation. She would do anything for him, even sacrifice her glamorous job. Reluctantly, the former PR hot shot takes a job at the ruggedly handsome Evans brothers' Mile High Adventures, a company offering restorative Rocky Mountain vacations. Brandon thinks PR is pointless, and Lilly knows less than nothing about the outdoors. Which is exactly why they need each other - in ways neither ever imagined.

Sixteen-year-old John Grady Cole's grandfather has just died, his parents have permanently separated, and the family ranch, upon which he had placed so many boyish hopes, has been sold. Rootless and increasingly restive, Cole leaves Texas, accompanied by his friend Lacey Rawlins, and begins a journey across the vaquero frontier into the badlands of northern Mexico.

When the postal inspector in Carson City discovered a counterfeit one-dollar bill, he notified the Secret Service. That was why they’d been created just a decade earlier. Secret Service Agent Sean Brady was assigned to the case and prepared to make the day-long train ride from Ogden to start his investigation. Before he left, he was presented with a minor mystery by the Union Pacific freight manager that had nothing to do with counterfeiting.

She's my first love. She's also my father's mistress's daughter. I'm Duke Wilder, and this is my story. I left Wildflower Canyon and Wilder Ranch ten years ago, away from my father and Elena—the girl I loved before I found out she was the daughter of my father's mistress. Now my father is gone, and he's left the ranch to me. I come back ready to sell it off piece by piece, to destroy his so-called legacy, and finally get revenge on the land that failed my mother. But coming back to the Colorado ranch country feels like stepping into a part of myself I've tried to forget.

Six years ago, Libby Jones' life was turned on it's head. Abandoned and pregnant, Libby changed her carefree, reckless life for both her and her son. There would be no more random hookups and no more partying. Dylan's entrance into her life was a blessing and changed everything in her life. Yet, nearly six years later, Libby is still discovering how much things in the past had changed her. The strong person Libby once was is now lost and confused with a man who wants nothing more than to love her and Dylan.

With my best friend at my side and a worn photograph in my pocket, we take a road trip to Sweet Whiskey, the bar where my parents met. As soon as we step inside, I know my life is irrevocably changed with a single look from a dark-eyed cowboy sitting on a stool. Colt is all alpha in a tight Henley and perfect pair of Wranglers, and my inner omega gushes for him in more ways than one. When I take a job dancing at the bar, he brings his alpha buddies on my first night. Brooks is bubbly and charming with a bright smile. Dallas is serious, but sweet and nurturing.

He's the grumpy cowboy foreman. I'm the city girl who inherited this ranch from my father. How the hell did we end up almost kissing in the barn? I didn't come back to Painted Sky Ranch to fall for the Casanova cowboy who's been glaring at me since I rolled up. Cash Bennett is all growl, grit, and maddening control. The same boy who made my life hell in school is now a broad-shouldered man, very good with a rope—and very bad at keeping his hands to himself. I have one year to stay here or lose my father's inheritance. Which means working side-by-side with the one man who doesn't want me here.

I screwed up my first solo potion, and now the customer is covered in hives. If that disaster wasn't bad enough, knowing it might get my family's potions house gobbled up by a competitor is the icing on the cake. What I didn't expect was for my father to ship me off to the Wild West monster haven of Pine Gulch as punishment. He calls it an opportunity to learn. Pfft. Pine Gulch is a temporary setback—I'll get back to the city in a New York minute. Except things don't go as planned when a mysterious sickness befalls the haven's animals.

After surviving a brutal ambush and the betrayal of someone they trusted, Jack and Elena are finally building something real on the quiet Colorado ranch left behind. Chickens. Mornings that start with coffee instead of gunfire. Silence that feels like healing instead of danger. But peace doesn’t last. When Jack uncovers a map hidden in Declan’s old gear—with his own name scrawled in red—everything tilts. Secrets buried in the ashes of old missions begin to surface, and the quiet they’ve fought for slips away with every unanswered question.

One minute Katie is eating lunch with her sister, the next she barely escapes a car bomb meant to kill her. Luckily, Federal agents are going to give her a new identity until she can testify against the man who wants her dead. They change her name to Presley, her hair color to brown, and her shorts and sandals to jeans and cowboy boots. She’s not thrilled about being sent to a small town in Montana to hide, but she wants to stay alive.

Sheriff Walt Longmire is enjoying a celebratory beer after a weapons certification at the Wyoming Law Enforcement Academy when a younger sheriff confronts him with a photograph of 25 armed men standing in front of a Challenger steam locomotive. It takes him back to when, fresh from the battlefields of Vietnam, then-deputy Walt accompanied his mentor Lucian to the annual Wyoming Sheriff's Association junket held on the excursion train known as the Western Star, which ran the length of Wyoming from Cheyenne to Evanston and back.