Max Brand S Best Western Stories

Wine on the desert--Virginia creeper-MacDonald's dream--Partners--Dust across the range--The bells of San Carlos.

Called the King of the Pulps, Frederick Schiller Faust, aka Max Brand, wrote nearly 400 Westerns from The Untamed to Destry Rides Again--a total of more than 220 books in this genre. Yet Max Brand also created Dr. Kildare (of books, films, and television) and wrote under twenty-one pseudonyms, in another dozen genres. This book removes the mask, with deeply personal memoirs from family, friends and fellow writers, taking us through his orphaned boyhood on the brutal ranches of California, his frustrating decades in Italy, as both a classical poet and a fast-action pulpist, to his heroic death as a war correspondent on the World War II battlefields. Faust's life story is augmented by a complete bibliography of his work--over a thousand books, stories, and films--plus the first listing of works about Faust.

The undead are back! In Undead in the West: Vampires, Zombies, Mummies, and Ghosts on the Cinematic Frontier, Cynthia J. Miller and A. Bowdoin Van Riper assembled a collection of essays that explored the unique intersection of two seemingly distinct genres in cinema: the western and the horror film. In this new volume, Undead in the West II: They Just Keep Coming, Miller and Van Riper expand their examination of undead Westerns to include not only film, but literature, sequential art, gaming, and fan culture (fan fiction, blogging, fan editing, and zombie walks). These essays run the gamut from comics and graphic novels such as American Vampire, Preacher, and Priest, and games like Darkwatch and Red Dead Redemption, to novels and short stories by celebrated writers including Robert E. Howard, Joe R. Lansdale, and Stephen King. Featuring a foreword by renowned science fiction author William F. Nolan (Logan’s Run) and an afterword by acclaimed game designer Paul O’Connor (Darkwatch), this collection will appeal to scholars of literature, gaming, and popular culture, as well as to fans of this unique hybrid.

William F. Nolan, using the knowledge acquired by writing more than 90 works of fiction, analyzes some of his and others' best work to help the reader with construction of characters, dramatic development, and dialogue. The writer will learn how to hook the reader on the first page, how to develop conflict, the craft of revision, and more.

The Western, though a singularly American art form, is one of the great genres of world literature with a truly global readership. It is also durable despite being often unfairly maligned. Ever since James Fenimore Cooper transformed frontier yarns into a distinct literary form, the Western has followed two paths: one populist - what Time magazine famously billed 'the American Morality Play' - capable of taking many points of view, from red to redneck, but always populist, with a sentimental attachment to the misfit; the other literary - eschewing heroism, debunking with unsettling candour many of the myths of the West. It can sometimes be difficult to draw a sure line between the two forms, but both are represented in this outstanding collection which includes stories by Rick Bass, Walter Van Tilburg Clark, Larry McMurtry, Mari Sandoz, Christopher Tilghman, and Mark Twain, among many others.

This is an encyclopedic work, arranged by broad categories and then by original authors, of literary pastiches in which fictional characters have reappeared in new works after the deaths of the authors that created them. It includes book series that have continued under a deceased writer's real or pen name, undisguised offshoots issued under the new writer's name, posthumous collaborations in which a deceased author's unfinished manuscript is completed by another writer, unauthorized pastiches, and "biographies" of literary characters. The authors and works are entered under the following categories: Action and Adventure, Classics (18th Century and Earlier), Classics (19th Century), Classics (20th Century), Crime and Mystery, Espionage, Fantasy and Horror, Humor, Juveniles (19th Century), Juveniles (20th Century), Poets, Pulps, Romances, Science Fiction and Westerns. Each original author entry includes a short biography, a list of original works, and information on the pastiches based on the author's characters.

From automatons to zombies, many elements of fantasy and science fiction have been cross-pollinated with the Western movie genre. In its second edition, this encyclopedia of the Weird Western includes many new entries covering film, television, animation, novels, pulp fiction, short stories, comic books, graphic novels and video and role-playing games. Categories include Weird, Weird Menace, Science Fiction, Space, Steampunk and Romance Westerns.