Butcher’s Crossing-Quality Guarantee

Description

Now a major motion picture starring Nicolas Cage and directed by Gabe Polsky.

In his National Book Award–winning novel Augustus, John Williams uncovered the secretsof ancient Rome. With Butcher’s Crossing, his fiercely intelligent, beautifully writtenwestern, Williams dismantles the myths of modern America.

It is the 1870s, and WillAndrews, fired up by Emerson to seek “an original relation to nature,” drops out ofHarvard and heads west. He washes up in Butcher’s Crossing, a small Kansas town onthe outskirts of nowhere. Butcher’s Crossing is full of restless men looking forways to make money and ways to waste it. Before long Andrews strikes up a friendshipwith 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 convinces Andrews to join in an expedition to track the animals down. The journeyout is grueling, but at the end is a place of paradisal richness. Once there, however,the three men abandon themselves to an orgy of slaughter, so caught up in killingbuffalo that they lose all sense of time. Winter soon overtakes them: they are snowedin. Next spring, half-insane with cabin fever, cold, and hunger, they stagger backto Butcher’s Crossing to find a world as irremediably changed as they have been.