The Collected Works of Billy the Kid - Softcover

Ondaatje, Michael

Softcover

ISBN 10: 067976786X ISBN 13: 9780679767862

Publisher: Vintage, 1996

Synopsis

Drawing on contemporary accounts, period photographs, dime novels, and his own prodigious fund of empathy and imagination, Michael Ondaatje's visionary novel traces the legendary outlaw'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.

About this title

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.

From the Inside Flap:

From the Booker Prize-winning author of The English Patient comes a visionary novel, a virtuoso synthesis of storytelling, history, and myth, about William Bonney, a.k.a. "Billy the Kid," a bloodthirsty ogre and outlaw saint. "Ondaatje's language is clean and energetic, with the pop of bullets."--Annie Dillard.

About this edition

• Publisher: Vintage
• Publication date: 1996
• ISBN 10: 067976786X
• ISBN 13: 9780679767862
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 128