Charles Portis

True Grit tells the story of Mattie Ross, who is just fourteen years of age when a coward going by the name of Tom Chaney shoots her father down in Fort Smith, Arkansas, and robs him of his life, his horse, and $150 in cash. Mattie leaves home to avenge her father’s blood. With the one-eyed Rooster Cogburn, the meanest available U.S. Marshal, by her side, Mattie pursues the homicide into Indian Territory. True Grit is eccentric, cool, straight, and unflinching, like Mattie herself. From a writer of true status, this is an American classic through and through.This mass-market edition includes an afterword by award-winning Donna Tartt, author of The Little Friend and The Secret History.

The narrator is Ray Midge, down-at-the-heels Southerner after his wife. "Norma had run off with Guy Dupree and I was waiting around for the credit card billings to come in so I could see where they had gone." The fussbudget is assailed by tropical storms, grifters, hippies, car trouble, and candy wrappers at high speed "wind came up through the floor hole in such a way that the Heath wrappers were suspended behind my head in a noisy brown vortex". Leech Dr Reo Symes is a font of dubious financial schemes and fluff such as a circus "fifty-pound rat from the sewers of Paris, France. Of course it didn't really weigh fifty pounds and it wasn't your true rat and it wasn't from Paris, France, either. It was some kind of animal from South America."

Out of the American Neon Desert of Roller Dromes, chili parlors, The Grand Ole Opry, and girls who want "to live in a trailer and play records all night" comes ex-marine and troubadour Norwood Pratt. Sent on a mission to New York by Grady Fring, the Kredit King, Norwood has visions of "speeding across the country in a late model car, seeing all the sights." Instead, he gets involved in a wild journey that takes him in and out of stolen cars, freight trains, and buses. By the time he returns home to Ralph, Texas, Norwood has met his true love, Rita Lee, on a Trailways bus; befriended Edmund B. Ratner, the second shortest midget in show business and "the world's smallest perfect fat man"; and helped Joann, "the chicken with a college education, " realize her true potential in life.

1917 France, Lamar Jimmerson finds a little book of Atlantean puzzles, Egyptian riddles, alchemical metaphors, and the Codex Pappus said to be the sacred Gnomonic text. He expands the noble brotherhood, survives scandalous schism, bids for governor of Indiana, and sees Gnomons gather in East Texas mobile home. This is an America of misfits and con men, oddballs and innocents.

With an uncommonly astute eye for the absurd details that comprise your average American, Charles Portis brings to life Jimmy Burns, an expatriate American living in Mexico. For a time, Jimmy spent his days unearthing pre-Columbian artifacts. Now he makes a living doing small trucking jobs and helping out with the occasional missing-person situation--whatever it takes to remain the very picture of an American idler in Mexico, right down to the grass-green golfing trousers. But Jimmy's laid-back lifestyle is being seriously imposed upon by a ninety-pound stalker named Louise, whose particular fascination with Jimmy is a mystery to him. Add to this a sudden wave of hippies led by a murderous ex-con guru in search of psychic happenings, archaeologists unearthing (illegally) the Mayan tombs, and Louise and her weirdo husband's quest for UFO landing sites, and Jimmy's simple south-of-the-border existence is facing clear and present danger.

Charles Portis, writer of fiction, has here short pieces, essays, memoirs, articles, and the new play Delray's New Moon. Topics cover civil rights, road trips in Baja, and Elvis' s visits to his aging mother. Also tributes by authors such as Donna Tartt and Ron Rosenbaum.

The ultimate for the first time in one collector's volume, the complete fiction and collected nonfiction of the author of True GritSummer reading recommendation in THE WASHINGTON POST, THE WALL STREET JOURNAL, and THE MILWAUKEE JOURNAL SENTINEL"Charles Portis is one of the great pure pleasures available in American literature." —Ron Rosenbaum"Like Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn and Thomas Berger’s Little Big Man , Charles Portis’s True Grit captures the naïve elegance of the American voice." —Jonathan Lethem"No living Southern writer captures the spoken idioms of the South as artfully as Portis does." —Donna Tartt"His fiction is the funniest I know." —Roy Blount, Jr.Twice adapted as a film, first in a version starring John Wayne and then by the Coen Brothers, True Grit is a wonder of novelistic perfection, told in the unforgettable voice of 14-year-old Mattie Ross as she sets out to avenge her murdered father in a quest that brings her out of her native Arkansas and into the wilds of the Choctaw Nation of the 1870s. One of the great literary Westerns, it is also a novel that has invited comparison with The Wizard of Oz , Alice in Wonderland , and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn .Portis's deadpan debut novel Norwood (1966) is, like True Grit , the story of a quest, though here the stakes are far an auto mechanic from Texas embarks on a madcap journey to New York City to try and recover $70 owed to him from an Army buddy.A book that according to Roy Blount Jr. “no one should die without having read,” The Dog of the South (1979) is yet a third saga of pursuit, this time all the way to Central America. Ray Midge is on the road looking for the man who has run off with his car (and of somewhat less interest to him, his wife.)Masters of Atlantis (1985) conjures the fictional cult of Gnomonism and takes an uproarious plunge into the dark heart of conspiratorial thinking and schismatic in-fighting.Gringos (1991), set in Mexico, follows an expatriate ex-Marine in his search to find a UFO hunter gone missing in the Yucatan, amid a supporting cast of archaeologists, drug-addled hippie millenarians, and the son of the “bravest dog in all Mexico.”A generous gathering of the nonfiction reveals Portis's skills as a reporter, above all in his coverage of the Civil Rights Movement; his appreciation of Arkansas history and landscape, as in “The Forgotten River”; and his poignancy as a family memoirist, on display in his recollection “Combinations of Jacksons.”

নিজের কর্মচারী টম চেনির হাতে খুন হয়েছে ফ্র্যাঙ্ক রস।আকস্মিক এই দুর্ঘটনায় শোকে মুহ্যমান মিসেস রস।ভাইবোনদুটোও খুব ছোট। বাধ্য হয়ে বাবার লাশ আনতে আরকানসাসে হাজির হল চোদ্দ বছরের কিশোরী ম্যাটি রস। বিস্মিত হল আইনের উদাসীনতায়।বাধ্য হয়ে হায়ার করল পশ্চিমের কুখ্যাত মার্শাল রুস্টার কগবার্নকে।যার অভিধানে ভয়-ডর বলে কোন শব্দ নেই। মঞ্চে হাজির হল আরও একজন- টেক্সাস রেঞ্জার লেবাফ, সেও খুঁজছে সিনেটরের খুনি টম চেনি ওরফে চেমসফোর্ডকে। তলে তলে ঘোঁট পাকালো লেবাফ আর রুস্টার।তবে হাল ছাড়ার পাত্রী না ম্যাটি রস। পিছু নিল দুই ম্যানহান্টারের।

Paperback comedy

Great condition.

Un western emblématique et plein d'humour autour d'une jeune héroïne de 14 ans.« — Je m'appelle Mattie Ross, dis-je. L'homme à la marque noire se fait appeler Chaney. Il a abattu mon père à Fort Smith avant de le dévaliser. Au moment des faits, Chaney était ivre et mon père n'était pas armé.— C'est vraiment triste, dit le capitaine.— Quand on le trouvera, on le tabassera à coups de bâtons, on l'arrêtera et on le ramènera à Fort Smith, dis-je. »Mattie n'a que 14 ans mais ne s'en laisse pas compter. Devant l'inaction des autorités, elle prend les choses en main et recrute Cogburn, un marshal dont la réputation n'est plus à faire.Mais voilà qu'un Texas Ranger, lui aussi aux trousses de Chaney, vient compliquer l'équation. L'expédition punitive promet d'être sanglante.

Vernon Merritt III, The Weapons Industry is a Menace by Ralph E Lapp, George Wallace, the Angry Man's Candidate, How We're Solving the Mysteries of the Moon, Who Was That Lady Bird I Saw You With? by Anne Chamberlin, True Grit (Conclusion), by Charles Portis, America, America , My Kind of People (Cartoons)

This rare and vintage book is a perfect addition to any bibliophile's collection