Here are 100 books that Pity the Beast fans have personally recommended if you like
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I set out to write my novel, a magical realism western, despite knowing nothing about magical realism or Westerns. I had to quickly get myself versed in both, and I was somewhat surprised to discover that, even in the 21st century, the Westerns that are often held up as the best feature a lot of tired stereotypes about brave white men, lawless people of color (when they are mentioned at all), women without agency, and a wild land that requires taming. I believe that my novel upends some of these Western tropes, and I am happy to report that many other novels in recent years have done the same.
Orphaned young, Ming Tsu is the son of Chinese immigrants but was raised by a ruthless gang of outlaws during the California Gold Rush. When, as an adult, his wife is kidnapped, Ming Tsu goes on a quest for revenge that pits him against some of the same men from his youth. And this is happening at the same time a bitter fury rages across the nation at the Chinese men brought into the US during westward expansion.
Lin's book is gritty and propulsive, and Ming Tsu is an ass-kicker on par with any cowboy John Wayne ever played.
Orphaned young, Ming Tsu, the son of Chinese immigrants, is raised by the notorious leader of a California crime syndicate, who trains him to be his deadly enforcer. But when Ming falls in love with Ada, the daughter of a powerful railroad magnate, and the two elope, he seizes the opportunity to escape to a different life. Soon after, in a violent raid, the tycoon's henchmen kidnap Ada and conscript Ming into service for the Central Pacific Railroad. Battered, heartbroken, and yet defiant, Ming partners with a blind clairvoyant known only as the prophet. Together the two set out to…
The dragons of Yuro have been hunted to extinction.
On a small, isolated island, in a reclusive forest, lives bandit leader Marani and her brother Jacks. With their outlaw band they rob from the rich to feed themselves, raiding carriages and dodging the occasional vindictive…
I set out to write my novel, a magical realism western, despite knowing nothing about magical realism or Westerns. I had to quickly get myself versed in both, and I was somewhat surprised to discover that, even in the 21st century, the Westerns that are often held up as the best feature a lot of tired stereotypes about brave white men, lawless people of color (when they are mentioned at all), women without agency, and a wild land that requires taming. I believe that my novel upends some of these Western tropes, and I am happy to report that many other novels in recent years have done the same.
This sweeping novel moves from the Caribbean to the American West and follows Rosa Rendón, a free Black woman, as she flees her home in Trinidad when it changes from Spanish to British rule.
Uncertain about whether she will be allowed to remain free under the new government, she travels to the United States, where she falls in with the Crow people of Montana. Beautifully researched and masterfully told, this is a fabulous read for anyone interested in the history of Black men and women in the West.
Ambitious and masterfully-wrought, Lauren Francis-Sharma's Book of the Little Axe is an incredible journey, spanning decades and oceans from Trinidad to the American West during the tumultuous days of warring colonial powers and westward expansion.
In 1796 Trinidad, young Rosa Rendon quietly but purposefully rebels against the life others expect her to lead. Bright, competitive, and opinionated, Rosa sees no reason she should learn to cook and keep house, for it is obvious her talents lie in running the farm she, alone, views as her birthright. But when her homeland changes from…
I set out to write my novel, a magical realism western, despite knowing nothing about magical realism or Westerns. I had to quickly get myself versed in both, and I was somewhat surprised to discover that, even in the 21st century, the Westerns that are often held up as the best feature a lot of tired stereotypes about brave white men, lawless people of color (when they are mentioned at all), women without agency, and a wild land that requires taming. I believe that my novel upends some of these Western tropes, and I am happy to report that many other novels in recent years have done the same.
LaValle brings his trademark mastery of horror and suspense to the American West in this story about the dangers of the past and the perils of being a woman alone. In 1915, Adelaide flees California for Montana, tugging behind her a locked steamer trunk inside which lives a deadly secret.
Spooky, riveting, and uncomfortably timeless in its portrayal of how Black women are treated in the United States, this is a necessary addition to the canon.
Blue skies, empty land—and enough wide-open space to hide a horrifying secret. A woman with a past, a mysterious trunk, a town on the edge of nowhere, and an “absorbing, powerful” (BuzzFeed) new vision of the American West, from the award-winning author of The Changeling.
“Propulsive . . . LaValle combines chills with deep insights into our country’s divides.”—Los Angeles Times
ONE OF THE MOST ANTICIPATED BOOKS OF 2023: The New York Times, Time, Oprah Daily, Los Angeles Times, Esquire, Essence, Salon, Vulture, Reader’s Digest, The Root, LitHub, Paste, PopSugar, Chicago Review of Books, BookPage, Book Riot, Tordotcom, Crime Reads,…
Jake Sledge, a rugged ex-cop turned private eye, teams up with his colossal partner Bobo to navigate the gritty streets of River City.
A murdered lawyer drags them into a web of political intrigue, neo-Nazi thugs, and bloody showdowns. With sharp wit and hard-hitting action, Jake tackles scumbags the only…
I set out to write my novel, a magical realism western, despite knowing nothing about magical realism or Westerns. I had to quickly get myself versed in both, and I was somewhat surprised to discover that, even in the 21st century, the Westerns that are often held up as the best feature a lot of tired stereotypes about brave white men, lawless people of color (when they are mentioned at all), women without agency, and a wild land that requires taming. I believe that my novel upends some of these Western tropes, and I am happy to report that many other novels in recent years have done the same.
In 1877, Bridget arrives penniless in Dodge City, Kansas, and, needing work, takes a job at the Buffalo Queen, a brothel run by women. Bridget finds friendship and community among the other sporting women until their relative peace is shattered by the arrival of legendary female gunslinger Spartan Lee.
Cravens delivers a one-two punch of queer love and swashbuckling action that culminates in an explosive finale. Cinematic, brilliantly paced, and sexy as hell, this is a story that will and should turn the Western on its head.
'A Western like you've never seen before: a story of reinvention, sex work, found family, and queer self-discovery' Harper's Bazaaar, Best Queer Books of 2023
In the summer of 1877, Bridget is orphaned when her unreliable father succumbs to a snakebite as they're crossing the Kansas prairie. Arriving in Dodge City as a penniless orphan, she's quickly recruited for work at the Buffalo Queen brothel and befriends her bookish mentor Constance, securing her home and employment as the favourite of Sheriff's Deputy Jim Bonnie. As winter creeps in from the plains, female gunfighter Spartan Lee rides into town, and Bridget…
I grew up around ranch and rodeo life, having always been fascinated by it, attended several rodeos each year. Watching Jonnie Jonckowski ride bulls and Martha Josey break records wining barrel races—they were an inspiration. When an opportunity arose for me to build a career around researching and writing about cowgirls, rodeo, and cattlewomen, it was a dream come true. Hope you enjoy the books about them that I’ve recommended.
Cowgirls evoke a variety of images: Wild West show shootist, rodeo athletes, working ranch women, and pin-ups. Many stories, dime novels, and a plethora of fiction about the cowgirl confuse her true history and are in many ways responsible for why we have so many interpretations of her. In The Cowgirls, Joyce Gibson Roach unravels the folklore to give us the history of the cowgirl, the good, and the “lady rustlers,” to explain her longevity as heroic cattlewomen who hold our attention and fascination even today. Roach’s narrative is as entertaining as it is informative and is a history any fan of the cowgirl should read.
An important chapter in the history and folklore of the West is how women on the cattle frontier took their place as equal partners with men. The cowboy may be our most authentic folk hero, but the cowgirl is right on his heels. This Spur Award winning book fills a void in the history of the cowgirl.
While Susan B. Anthony and her hoop-skirted friends were declaring that females too were created equal, Sally Skull was already riding and roping and marking cattle with her Circle S brand on the frontier of Texas. Wearing rawhide bloomers and riding astride, she…
I was born in a little shipbuilding town in Scotland but, like everyone else in the world back then, I grew up in the American West. These were the stories we all grew up with – burned into our imaginations along with stories from the Bible or the Greek myths. Nowadays, the West is still important to me – but today it is the personal accounts of the West that interest me most – the personal diaries and eye-witness accounts of the brides, the doctors, teachers, mothers, children, who experienced the West first-hand.
The hard-drinking, cigar-smoking, cross-dressing heroine of the American West continues to keep a python grip on the imagination.“I’m a howling coyote from Bitter Creek, the further up you go the worse it gets and I’m from the headwaters,” she used to rap. Calamity fascinates because she is a self-made myth and Linda Jucovy’s biography is an informed and insightful exploration of that myth.
“Who in the world would think that Calamity Jane would get to be such a famous person?” one of the pallbearers at her funeral asked an interviewer many years later. It seemed like a reasonable question. Who else has accomplished so little by conventional standards and yet achieved such enduring fame?
But conventional standards do not apply. Calamity was poor, uneducated, and an alcoholic. For decades, she wandered through the small towns and empty spaces of the Dakotas, Wyoming, and Montana. But she also had a natural talent for self-invention. She created a story about herself and promoted it tirelessly…
Caroline Herschel has always lived in the shadows. Beholden to her wildly popular older brother, William, who rescued her from servitude, she's worked hard to build a life for herself – one where she can go unnoticed and repay the debt she believes she owes him. But when her brother…
Just because you’re told something is true doesn’t make it the case. I have never accepted received ideas before subjecting them first to my own personal sniff test. Non-fiction is a wonderful way of acquiring knowledge, and stories open a door to the human soul to make possible living through someone else’s sensibility. Life becomes more vibrant and meaningful. My Ph.D. in English taught me to analyze the ways writers tell their stories. Add in my own life experience, and something magical happens during the creative process. Whether writing historical, literary, or popular fiction, I can’t help but reshape limitation into independence and personal freedom.
While researching Annie Oakley as a character in my novel, I was amazed by what an exceptional icon she was. This non-fiction book gives sumptuous detail about a singular woman and the life she led. Oakley met Frank at a shooting competition, where she beat him by only one shot. Rather than becoming defensive, he married her and became her agent. Clearly, she didn't need his help to do what she did better than anyone else in the world, but he helped showcase her skills for adoring crowds in a rough and tumble business. My protagonist Abigail was inspired by her, and frankly so am I.
With a widowed mother and six siblings, Annie Oakley first became a trapper, hunter, and sharpshooter simply to put food on the table. Yet her genius with the gun eventually led to her stardom in Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show during the latter half of the nineteenth century. The archetypal western woman, Annie Oakley urged women to take up shooting to procure food, protect themselves, and enjoy healthy exercise, yet she was also the proper Victorian lady, demurely dressed and skeptical about the value of women's suffrage. Glenda Riley presents the first interpretive biography of the complex woman who was…
I’m Marsali Taylor, a retired teacher of English, French and Drama. I’ve always been interested in women’s history—not queens and countesses, but what life was like for ordinary people like me. A chance to research women’s suffrage in the Scottish National Library got me started reading these women’s stories in their own words—and what stories they were, from the first women graduates to the war workers. Women’s Suffrage in Shetlandtook two years of fascinating research, and Ihope it’s the foundation for more work by other researchers, both here in Shetland and in other communities whose women fought for the vote.
These women did know their place – they’d measured it out, filled in the claim forms, assembled their tiny wood shack cabin or turf –roofed dugout, sewn their corn and dug their vegetable patch. The usual picture of pioneer women is as the mother of the family, but a staggering 12% of those Wild West pioneering homesteaders were single women or widows, and this is the story of over twenty of them. After introductory chapters, it’s told in their voices, through magazine articles, letters back home and memoirs written later. We learn about how they set out on their adventure, the reality of farming and how they coped, and their triumph as they won their claim. Fascinating.
Instead of talking about the rights of women, these frontier women grabbed the opportunity to become landowners by homesteading in the still wild west of the early 1900s. Here they tell their stories in their own words-through letters and articles of the time-of adventure, independence, foolhardiness, failure, and freedom.
I had never been out of a Los Angeles suburb until my high school biology teacher took our class on a river trip running rapids down the Yampa and Green Rivers in Colorado and Utah. The trip was absolutely exhilarating and opened my eyes to the American West and to a career exploring its geology and landscapes. Fifty years and over 300 field trips later, mostly in southern California, I finally learned enough to write Roadside Geology of Southern California. That book was followed by the second editions of Geology Underfoot in Southern California, and Geology Underfoot in Death Valley and Eastern California with co-authors Allen Glazner and Robert Sharp.
If I could return to any place and time in history, it would be to the American West in the years between 1830 to 1880. It was an exciting time of exploration, territorial acquisitions, invention, and discovery of all of the major mineral deposits (Comstock Lode 1859, Butte 1864, Mother Lode 1849), construction of a transcontinental railroad (completed 1869), and establishment of the world’s first national park, Yellowstone (1872). This book opened my eyes to the American West.
Acclaimed author of biographical and historical fiction Irving Stone turns his magnificent talent to telling America's most colorful and exciting story-the opening of the Far West.
Men to Match My Mountains is a true historical masterpiece, an unforgettable pageant of giants-men like John Sutter, whose dream of paradise was shattered by the California Gold Rush; Brigham Young and the Mormons, who tamed the desert with Bible texts; and the silver kings and the miners, who developed Nevada's Comstock Lode and settled the Rockies.
America called for greatness...and got it. There is nothing in history to match the stories of these…
Rodney Bradford comes into Lindsay's restaurant, offers to buy her small house for double its value, eats her brownies, and drops dead on the sidewalk in front. Next, her almost-ex-husband offers to sign the divorce papers, but only if she'll give him her small,…
I have always had an interest in the American frontier and the Native peoples. But while researching the novelBrave Enemies and Boone: A BiographyI spent years studying and visiting places where the stories occur, and using archives and libraries. However, the most important consideration is storytelling, rewarding the reader with a good story.
In this volume Belue has done the almost impossible task of transcribing the text of Draper’s unpublished manuscript of Boone’s life. Draper spent his career collecting documents and interviews about Boone and the settlement of the Ohio Valley, but never managed to finish the work. Only those who have tried to read Draper’s manuscripts can appreciate the heroic task Belue has accomplished. I relied extensively on this volume.
Draper, the first secretary of the State Historical Society of Wisconsin, collected more than 500 volumes of material on the famed frontiersman Daniel Boone. His biography of Boone remained unfinished for 100 years until Ted Franklin Belue, a widely read scholar of early Americana, added his authoritative editing. This long-awaited work is filled with little-known information on Boone and his family, long hunters, the Shawnee, the fur trade, and frontier life in general.
