Long before Louis L'Amour, Max Brand, or Zane Grey thought about swinging up into a saddle, women were blazing a trail for the Western story. Even prior to 1902 with Owen Wister’s The Virginian which is widely respected as the novel that put the genre on the map, female authors were far ahead on the…
From the early 1970s until 1992’s Unforgiven, Westerns had become outmoded, pitiful television productions and lame B-films that had run the genre into the dust heap, and unless Clint Eastwood was starring in the saddle, no Western was getting noticed. I was still unabashedly hooked, even with the worst of the lot, and championed the…
According to Booklist, “The name Max Brand is synonymous with Western novels.” And it’s certainly true that Brand, along with Louis L’Amour and Zane Grey, stamped an indelible impression on the Western genre that can still be felt rippling through the work of today’s modern wordslingers. The man born Frederick Schiller Faust went by numerous…
A beautiful cover must deliver a better quality papercut, because all of these hurt me with their greatness. I buy lean, yellowed “vintage” paperbacks of all genres. I like reading them, even though the pages are often brittle and fragile. To me, they're kind of Velveteen Rabbits that don't mind having lost ears and button…
