The Collected Works of Billy the Kid - (Vintage International) by Michael Ondaatje (Paperback)

About the Book

From the Booker Prize-winning author of The English Patient comes a visionary novel, a virtuoso synthesis of storytelling, history, and myth, about William Bonney, a.k.a. "Billy the Kid", a bloodthirsty ogre and outlaw saint. "Ondaatje's language is clean and energetic, with the pop of bullets".--Annie Dillard.

Book Synopsis

Drawing on contemporary accounts, period photographs, dime novels, and his own prodigious fund of empathy and imagination, Michael Ondaatje's visionary novel traces the legendary outlaw's passage across the blasted landscape of 1880 New Mexico and the collective unconscious of his country. The Collected Works of Billy the Kid is a virtuoso synthesis of storytelling, history, and myth by a writer who brings us back to our familiar legends with a renewed sense of wonder.

From the Back Cover

From the Booker Prize-winning author of The English Patient comes a visionary novel about an icon of American violence. William Bonney killed his first man when he was twelve. By the time he was twenty-one he had, by his own reckoning, slain nineteen more. In the intervening years he had become "Billy the Kid", bloodthirsty ogre and outlaw saint, a boy with buck teeth and a pleasant face who could shoot a stranger calmly in the heart and walk away while birds ravaged the corpse. Drawing on contemporary accounts, period photographs, dime novels, and his own prodigious fund of empathy and imagination, Michael Ondaatje traces Billy's passage across the blasted landscape of 1880 New Mexico and the collective unconscious of his country. The Collected Works of Billy the Kid is a virtuoso synthesis of storytelling, history, and myth by a writer who brings us back to our familiar legends with a renewed sense of wonder.

Review Quotes

"Moving and tragic. . . . Ondaatje is a poet and even his prose moves with rhythmic circular precision." --The New York Times Book Review"The Collected Works of Billy the Kid strains one's powers of description.... Ondaatje's eye for detail is wonderful and he uses it poetically, with superb restraint."--Larry McMurtry, The Washington Post Book World"Wonderful.... Ondaatje's language is clean and energetic, with the pop of bullets. This is literature, art." --Annie Dillard

About the Author

Michael Ondaatje is a novelist and poet who lives in Toronto, Canada. He is the author of The English Patient, Divisadero, In the Skin of a Lion, Coming Through Slaughter, The Collected Works of Billy the Kid and Anil's Ghost; three collections of poems, The Cinnamon Peeler, Secular Love, and There's a Trick with a Knife I'm Learning to Do; and a memoir, Running in the Family. He received the Booker Prize for The English Patient.