The reading experience of a lifetime. "The Washington Post"
The National Book Award winner takes readers inside the epic fighting retreat of the Nez Perce Indians
In this new installment in his acclaimed Seven Dreams series of novels examining the collisions between Native Americans and European colonizers, William T. Vollmann tells the story of the epic fighting retreat of the Nez Perce Indians, with flashbacks to the Civil War.
Defrauded and intimidated at every turn, the Nez Perces finally went on the warpath in 1877, subjecting the U.S. Army to its greatest defeat since Little Big Horn the previous year, as they fled from northeast Oregon across Montana to the Canadian border. Vollmann s main character is not the legendary Chief Joseph but his pursuer, General Oliver Otis Howard, the brave, shy, tormented, devoutly Christian Civil War veteran. In this novel, we see him as commander, father, son, husband, friend, and killer.
Teeming with many vivid characters on both sides of the conflict, and written in an original style in which the printed page works as a stage with multiple layers of foreground and background, "The Dying Grass" is another mesmerizing achievement from one of the most ambitious writers of our time.
Praise for "The Dying Grass"
Vollmann is one of the most idiosyncratic and challenging novelists at work today. "The Dying Grass," like his other works, daringly pushes at the edges of the novel as a form while at the same time demanding that the reader sit up and pay attention. Jane Smiley, "The New York Times Book Review"
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A novel as involving and beautifully assembled as any this year . . . The story] whistles ahead with the grace and speed of an arrow. "The Wall Street Journal""