Listen free for 30 days

  • Butcher’s Crossing

  • Written by: John Williams
  • Narrated by: Anthony Heald
  • Length: 10 hrs and 21 mins
  • 4.3 out of 5 stars (8 ratings)

Try for $0.00
Pick 1 audiobook a month from our unmatched collection.
Listen all you want to thousands of included audiobooks, Originals, and podcasts.
Access exclusive sales and deals.
Premium Plus auto-renews for $14.95/mo + applicable taxes after 30 days. Cancel anytime.
Butcher’s Crossing cover art

Butcher’s Crossing

Written by: John Williams
Narrated by: Anthony Heald
Try for $0.00

$14.95 a month after 30 days. Cancel anytime.

Buy Now for $20.15

Buy Now for $20.15

Pay using card ending in
Switch payment method
By confirming your purchase, you agree to Audible's Conditions of Use and Amazon's Privacy Notice. Tax where applicable.

Publisher's Summary

It is the 1870s, and Will Andrews, fired up by Emerson to seek ''an original relation to nature,'' drops out of Harvard and heads west. He washes up in Butcher's Crossing, a small Kansas town on the outskirts of nowhere. Butcher's Crossing is full of restless men looking for ways to make money and ways to waste it. Before long Andrews strikes up a friendship with one of them, a man who regales Andrews with tales of immense herds of buffalo, ready for the taking, hidden away in a beautiful valley deep in the Colorado Rockies. He convinces Andrews to join in an expedition to track the animals down.

The journey out is grueling, but at the end is a place of paradisiacal richness. Once there, however, the three men abandon themselves to an orgy of slaughter, so caught up in killing buffalo that they lose all sense of time. Winter soon overtakes them: they are snowed in. Next spring, half-insane with cabin fever, cold, and hunger, they stagger back to Butcher's Crossing to find a world as irremediably changed as they have been.
©1988 John Williams (P)2010 Blackstone Audio
Classics Literature & Fiction Literary Fiction Genre Fiction
Show more Show less

What the critics say

“Harsh and relentless yet muted in tone, Butcher’s Crossing paved the way for Cormac McCarthy. It was perhaps the first and best revisionist western.” ( The New York Times Book Review)
“[This story] becomes a young man's search for the integrity of his own being....The characters are defined, the events lively, the place, the smells, the sounds right. And the prose is superb." ( Chicago Tribune)

What listeners say about Butcher’s Crossing

Average Customer Ratings
Overall
  • 4 out of 5 stars
  • 5 Stars
    5
  • 4 Stars
    2
  • 3 Stars
    0
  • 2 Stars
    0
  • 1 Stars
    1
Performance
  • 5 out of 5 stars
  • 5 Stars
    6
  • 4 Stars
    2
  • 3 Stars
    0
  • 2 Stars
    0
  • 1 Stars
    0
Story
  • 4.5 out of 5 stars
  • 5 Stars
    5
  • 4 Stars
    3
  • 3 Stars
    0
  • 2 Stars
    0
  • 1 Stars
    0

Reviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.

Audible.ca reviews

Amazon Reviews
Sort by:
Filter by:
  • Overall
    1 out of 5 stars
  • Performance
    4 out of 5 stars
  • Story
    4 out of 5 stars
Profile Image for Katherine

Great story...strange writing style.

Would have enjoyed the story but it was ruined by the main characters habit of floating into an out of body observation of his situation. During these moments in the book the writer rambles on and on, the characters thoughts resembling the thoughts of someone high on psychedelic drugs. Won't listen to it again.

Report this

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.

You voted on this review!

You reported this review!