The Collected Works of Billy the Kid. - Hardcover

Ondaatje, Michael

3.96

4,269 ratings by Goodreads

9780393087024: The Collected Works of Billy the Kid.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0393087026 ISBN 13: 9780393087024

Publisher: Viking Pr, 1974

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Fact and legend are combined in this journey into the mind and character of the notorious outlaw

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Review:

"The Collected Works of Billy the Kid strains one's powers of description.... Ondaatje's eye for detail is wonderful and he uses it poetically, with superb restraint."
--Larry McMurtry, "The Washington Post Book World"
"Wonderful.... Ondaatje's language is clean and energetic, with the pop of bullets. This is literature, art."
--Annie Dillard

"Moving and tragic. . . . Ondaatje is a poet and even his prose moves with rhythmic circular precision." --The New York Times Book Review"The Collected Works of Billy the Kid strains one's powers of description.... Ondaatje's eye for detail is wonderful and he uses it poetically, with superb restraint."--Larry McMurtry, The Washington Post Book World"Wonderful.... Ondaatje's language is clean and energetic, with the pop of bullets. This is literature, art." --Annie Dillard

From the Back Cover:

From the Booker Prize-winning author of The English Patient comes a visionary novel about an icon of American violence. William Bonney killed his first man when he was twelve. By the time he was twenty-one he had, by his own reckoning, slain nineteen more. In the intervening years he had become "Billy the Kid", bloodthirsty ogre and outlaw saint, a boy with buck teeth and a pleasant face who could shoot a stranger calmly in the heart and walk away while birds ravaged the corpse. Drawing on contemporary accounts, period photographs, dime novels, and his own prodigious fund of empathy and imagination, Michael Ondaatje traces Billy's passage across the blasted landscape of 1880 New Mexico and the collective unconscious of his country. The Collected Works of Billy the Kid is a virtuoso synthesis of storytelling, history, and myth by a writer who brings us back to our familiar legends with a renewed sense of wonder.

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