Purchase
Modern Library
April 2008
On Sale: April 8, 2008
912 pages
ISBN: 0679640193
EAN: 9780679640196
Hardcover
Add to Wish List
Non-Fiction
Peter Matthiessenβs great American epicβKilling Mister Watson, Lost Manβs River, and Bone by Boneβwas conceived as one vast mysterious novel, but because of its length it was originally broken up into three books. In this bold new rendering, Matthiessen has cut nearly a third of the overall text and collapsed the time frame while deepening the insights and motivations of his characters with brilliant rewriting throughout. In Shadow Country, he has marvelously distilled a monumental work, realizing his original vision. Inspired by a near-mythic event of the wild Florida frontier at the turn of the twentieth century, Shadow Country reimagines the legend of the inspired Everglades sugar planter and notorious outlaw E. J. Watson, who drives himself relentlessly toward his own violent end at the hands of neighbors who mostly admired him, in a killing that obsessed his favorite son. Shadow Country traverses strange landscapes and frontier hinterlands inhabited by Americans of every provenance and color, including the black and Indian inheritors of the archaic racism that, as Watsonβs wife observed, "still casts its shadow over the nation." Peter Matthiessenβs lyrical and illuminating work in the Watson narrative has been praised highly by such contemporaries as Saul Bellow, William Styron, and W. S. Merwin. Joseph Heller said "I read it in great gulps, up each night later than I wanted to be, in my hungry impatience to find out more and more."
 Media BuzzMorning Edition - November 20, 2008
All Things Considered - June 3, 2008
Charlie Rose - May 27, 2008
| 
© 2003-2026