'One of the finest books about the elusive nature of the West ever written...It's a graceful and brutal story of isolated men gone haywire.'

(Time Out New York)

'Harsh and relentless yet muted in tone, Butcher's Crossing paved the way for Cormac McCarthy. It was perhaps the first and best revisionist western.'

(The New York Times Book Review)

'One of the finest novels of the West ever to come out of the West.'

(The Denver Post)

'This story about the hunt of one of the last great buffalo herds "becomes a young man's search for the integrity of his own being...The characters are defined, the events lively, the place, the smells, the sounds right. And the prose is superb, a rarity in writing about the west. More, John Williams.'

(The Chicago Tribune)

'John Williams's unsparing novels express a highly qualified though resilient optimism about our ability to salvage something of value from life's impossible conditions. Along with the necessary isolation of the artist, he conveys the sobering if startled recognition--perhaps with his own career in mind--of the transitory triumph of art.'

(Times Literary Supplement)