"McLarty's storytelling skills shine in this ribald, riotously funny, but also poignant novel." —David Baldacci
With his first two novels, Ron McLarty won acclaim for fashioning authentic characters that hook readers from the first page. With Art in America, McLarty has invented another unforgettable protagonist in one failed writer, Steven Kearney. Hired by the Creedemore Historical Society to write and direct a play about...

Born into a respected Irish-Anglo family in 1860, Charles O’Brien loves his native land and its long-suffering but irrepressible people. As a healer, he travels the countryside dispensing traditional cures while soaking up stories and legends of bygone times.
At the age of forty, summoned to Paris to treat his dying countryman–the famous and infamous Oscar Wilde–Charles experiences the fateful moment of his life. In a chance encounter...

"One hundred years ago, American patriots picked up rifles and fought against British tyranny. That was Boston. There the enemy was King George III and his British troops. Now, In Last Chance, Texas, in the Big Bend River country, it's Abraham Hacker, a ruthless cattle baron who will slaughter anyone who tries to lay claim to the fertile land and everything on it. For Last Chance, freedom is under siege one violent act at a time. Until wounded Texas...

"Your country isn't perfect--but with a little planning and a personalized flag, your true utopia may be as close as your own backyard! Here are the stories of thirty self-made places around the world built with a dream of utopia: from the Gay and Lesbian Kingdom of the Coral Sea Islands to the Indian rock garden of Nek Chand to the micronation of Sealand and much more. Whether they were building an ideal community, a safe haven, an inspiring structure,...

Follows the Dutton family, led by John Dutton, who controls the largest contiguous ranch in the United States, under constant attack by those it borders--land developers, an Indian reservation, and America's first National Park. It is an intense study of a violent world far from media scrutiny--where land grabs make developers billions, and politicians are bought and sold by the world's largest oil and lumber corporations. Where drinking water poisoned...

"The story of our separate and unequal America in the making, and one man's fight against it--During the long, hot summers of the late 1960s and 1970s, one man began a campaign to open some of America's most exclusive beaches to minorities and the urban poor. That man was anti-poverty activist and one-time presidential candidate Ned Coll of Connecticut, a state that permitted public access to a mere seven miles of its 253-mile shoreline. Nearly all...

Stripped of his possessions and executed as a result of Mao's Land Reform Movement in 1948, benevolent landowner Ximen Nao finds himself endlessly tortured in Hell before he is systematically reborn on Earth as each of the animals in the Chinese zodiac.