Daniel Woodrell - The Outlaw Album - Stories

DANIEL WOODRELL was born in the Missouri Ozarks, left school and enlisted in the marines the week he turned seventeen, received his bachelor’s degree at age twenty-seven, graduated from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and spent a year on a Michener Fellowship. Winter’s Bone, his eighth novel, was made into a film that won the Sundance Film Festival’s Best Picture Prize in 2010 and was nominated for four Academy Awards. Five of his novels were selected as New York Times Notable Books of the year. Tomato Red won the PEN West Award for fiction in 1999, and The Death of Sweet Mister received the 2011 Clifton Fadiman Medal from the Center for Fiction. The Outlaw Album is Woodrell’s first collection of stories. He lives in the Ozarks near the Arkansas line with his wife, Katie Estill.

Winter’s Bone

The Death of Sweet Mister

Tomato Red

Give Us a Kiss: A Country Noir

The Ones You Do

Muscle for the Wing

Woe to Live On (reissued as Ride with the Devil )

Under the Bright Lights

“Woodrell writes about violence and dark deeds better than almost anyone in America today, in compact, musical prose that doesn’t dwell on visceral detail. An unerring craftsman, he can fully describe a murder in one rich sentence…. Most of the stories deal with the darkest recesses of the human heart, and once you begin reading them you can’t stop.”

“An intense volume of fury and blood in the Ozarks, it crystallizes Woodrell’s slicing wit and unflinching confrontation with criminality and tragedy.”

“ The Outlaw Album is a collection of stories by one of the world’s great novelists, Daniel Woodrell, and it’s brilliant.”

“A stunner. Woodrell has the rare ability to tell compelling stories rooted in familiar soil that are simultaneously simple and complex, local and universal, funny and tragic.”

“Woodrell’s prose is spare, even stern, yet capable of unexpected lyricism. Amid the rage, despair, and hatred his characters live with, he teases out and displays their deep stores of love and loyalty, and a surprisingly bracing humor.”

“A writer whose words flow with the elemental power of Cormac McCarthy, William Gay, and Chris Offutt, he’s chipped an impression of the Ozarks and its people in stone that will endure time…. Let these stories be your Bible.”

“The human desperation behind the violence is gripping. If anyone understands what motivates a man to keep shooting a corpse with a squirrel rifle, it’s Woodrell.”

“Woodrell’s Old Testament prose and blunt vision have a chilly timelessness that suggests this novel will speak to readers as long as there are readers.”

“Despite the roughness of the content, Woodrell has a poet’s sense of how to turn a phrase…. Seek him out now, throw down fifteen bucks, and bend your face to the page. You’ll come away as I do—darkly changed, begging for another.”

“The lineage from Faulkner to Woodrell runs as deep and true as an Ozark stream in this book… his most profound and haunting work yet.”

Copyright © 2011 by Daniel Woodrell

All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

Little, Brown and Company

Hachette Book Group

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First eBook Edition: October 2011

Little, Brown and Company is a division of Hachette Book Group, Inc. The Little, Brown name and logo are trademarks of Hachette Book Group, Inc.

Grateful acknowledgment is made to the publishers of earlier versions of these stories: Esquire, “Twin Forks” and “Night Stand”; New Letters, “Black Step” and “The Horse in Our History”; Missouri Review, “Woe to Live On”; Murdaland (an anthology), “The Echo of Neighborly Bones”; A Hell of a Woman ( an anthology), “Uncle”; Men from Boys (an anthology),”Two Things”; and Bloodlines (an anthology), “The Horse in Our History.” Parts of “Woe to Live On” appeared in the novel Woe to Live On .

The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

The publisher is not responsible for websites (or their content) that are not owned by the publisher.

ISBN: 978-0-316-19339-9