american portrait southwest twenty-six

books:

Portrait of an Artist With Twenty-six Horses: A Classic Novel of the American Southwest

1 review
William Eastlake

Bamberger Books, 1991

Hard-to-find Gem
Portrait of an Artist With Twenty Six Horses is an excellent read if you enjoy non-traditional, non-linear fiction. There is something happening linearly in the book - a young man is dying and coming to grips with his death - but within that loose framework Eastlake ranges far and wide, among various episodes and incidents in the man's short life. Eastlake is digging for the poetic, subjective ...

CASTLE KEEP

4 reviews
William Eastlake

Fawcett Crest, 1969

Better than Hell(er)
If Jim Jarmusch ever decides to do a war film, this is what he should base it on. This is a wonderfully odd, comic and moving account of war as pure absurdity. The writing is tons better than Heller in Catch-22, the most obvious comparison. Set in Belgium, a group of American soldiers are given the assignment of holding a castle against the on-coming German front. Their leader is a one-eyed ...

Lyric of the Circle Heart: The Bowman Family Trilogy (American Literature Series)

1 review
William Eastlake

Dalkey Archive Press, 1996

One Stand-out Novel and Two Lesser Ones
This is a collection (denominated a "trilogy") of three short novels by William Eastlake -- GO IN BEAUTY (originally published in 1956), THE BRONC PEOPLE (1958), and PORTRAIT OF AN ARTIST WITH TWENTY-SIX HORSES (1963). According to a note at the beginning of this volume, the collection was "revised" and retitled by Eastlake in 1995. I don't know to what extent the individual novels, as ...

The bronc people

4 reviews
William Eastlake

Harcourt, Brace, 1958

If you want to read "The Bronc People".....
This book is available as a part of "Lyric of the Circle Heart: The Bowman Family Trilogy", published in 1996. Three Eastlake novels, "Go in Beauty", "The Bronc People", and "Portrait of an Artist with Twenty-six Horses" comprise the trilogy. *****

The Bamboo Bed

2 reviews
William Eastlake

Avon Books, 1985

The mother of Vietnam war fiction
The Bamboo Bed was published in 1969. Eastlakes vision of the Vietnam war is dominated by its absurdity. These two facts intertwine to support my summary that the book is the mother of all Vietnam war fiction. Eastlake, a WWII vet, went to Vietnam and published some dispatches from there for The Nation magazine. His vision of the war as an absurdity long ago became a cliche in fiction and ...