Amazon named it a “Best Book of 2016” and Men’s Journal named it one of the 7 Best Books of January!
Coming soon in Large Print, Huck Out West by Robert Coover, is continuing to receive extraordinary reviews from Booklist, The Washington Post, Publisher’s Weekly, and many more! We can’t be more excited to have this title available soon in a format for all readers to enjoy.
“Coover delivers a near-masterpiece. It’s pitch-perfect and laceratingly funny but also a surprisingly tender, touching paean to the power of storytelling and the pains of growing up.”—STAR Booklist review
“The characters are colorful, with names such as Pegleg, Yaller Whiskers, and Eyepatch. Huck finds love and there’s the inevitable return of Tom, whose adult mischief is more sinister than his teen antics. A lively and fast-paced encore for a beloved American hero.” –Publisher’s Weekly
“Revisiting Huckleberry Finn’s America—by picking up where Mark Twain left off.”-Kirkus Reviews
Our leading postmodernist novelist turns his iconoclastic eye to a great American classic in this sequel to The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.
At the end of Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn, on the eve of the Civil War, Huck and Tom Sawyer decide to escape “sivilization” and “light out for the Territory.” In Robert Coover’s Huck Out West, also “wrote by Huck,” the boys do just that, riding for the famous but short-lived Pony Express, then working as scouts for both sides in the war.
They are suddenly separated when Tom decides he’d rather own civilization than leave it, returning east with his new wife, Becky Thatcher, to learn the law from her father. Huck, abandoned and “dreadful lonely,” hires himself out to “whosoever.” He rides shotgun on coaches, wrangles horses on a Chisholm Trail cattle drive, joins a gang of bandits, guides wagon trains, gets dragged into U.S. Army massacres, suffers a series of romantic and barroom misadventures!
“Twain grew up among African-Americans, mostly slaves, and he learned to love them, but Native Americans were another story—a story he actually began, called “Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer Among the Indians.” Very early in his narrative, the savages reveal their irredeemably vicious nature by massacring everybody in sight, and, soon after that, probably because it had in effect dead-ended, Twain abandoned the story. I decided to take up his notion of Huck and Tom heading West just before the American Civil War, seeing the horror of the time through Huck’s eyes, while retaining the feel of “A Boy’s Adventure Story.” –The New Yorker
“Whether it’s read as a companion to Twain’s iconic novel or as a standalone work, Huck Out West is a robust and revealing portrait of the American frontier in a time of dramatic and often wrenching transition.”-BookPage
Pre-order your copies today! Available May 2017 directly through Thorndike Press or with all major wholesalers. Visit www.gale.com/thorndike.