The nail biters, thumb suckers and teeth grinders at the Box Canyon Boys Camp were called the Bedwetters. They were the cast-away offspring of parents who were busy traveling, being divorced, remarrying and garnering fortunes. They were rejects...Until Cotton. Cotton pulled them together. Cotton led them on that fantastic mission to strike one final blow in the desperate battle to save themselves.This haunting novel is eloquent testimony that all lost children are not born in ghettoes. Cruel in its clarity, touching in its portrayal of the inner and outer realities of adolescence, BLESS THE BEASTS AND CHILDREN is a profoundly moving book.

IN PIONEER NEBRASKA, A WOMAN LEADS WHERE NO MAN WILL GO Soon to be a major motion picture directed by Tommy Lee Jones, The Homesman is a devastating story of early pioneers in 1850s American West. It celebrates the ones we hear nothing of: the brave women whose hearts and minds were broken by a life of bitter hardship. A "homesman" must be found to escort a handful of them back East to a sanitarium. When none of the county's men steps up, the job falls to Mary Bee Cuddy—ex-teacher, spinster, indomitable and resourceful. Brave as she is, Mary Bee knows she cannot succeed alone. The only companion she can find is the low-life claim jumper George Briggs. Thus begins a trek east, against the tide of colonization, against hardship, Indian attacks, ice storms, and loneliness—a timeless classic told in a series of tough, fast-paced adventures. In an unprecedented sweep, Glendon Swarthout's novel won both the Western Writers of...

THE SHOOTIST is John Bernard Books, a man of principle and the only surviving gunfighter in a vanishing American West.He rides into El Paso in the year 1901, on the day Queen Victoria died, there to be told by a doctor that he must soon confront the greatest shootist of all: Death himself. In such a showdown, against such an antagonist, he cannot win.Most men may end their days in bed or take their own lives, but a man-killer has a third option, one which Books decides to exercise. He may choose his own executioner.As word spreads that the famous assassin has reached the end of his rope, an assortment of vultures gathers to feast upon his corpse - among them a gambler, a rustler, an undertaker, an old love, a reporter, even a boy. Books outwits them, however, by selecting the where, when, who, and why of his death and writing in fire from a pair of Remingtons the last courageous act of his own legend. The climatic gunfight itself is an incredible performance by an incredible man, and by his creator, Glendon Swarthout.THE SHOOTIST will rank with such classics as Shane and The Ox-Bow Incident, but is is much more than a Western. When, in the final afternoon of his life, J. B. Books crosses a street and enters a saloon to make something of his death, we cross, we enter, with him. He is us.