Robert Olmstead

The year is 1916. The enemy, Pancho Villa, is elusive. Terrain is unforgiving. Through the mountains and across the long dry stretches of Mexico, Napoleon Childs, an aging cavalryman, leads an expedition of inexperienced horse soldiers on seemingly fruitless searches. Though he is seasoned at such missions, things go terribly wrong, and his patrol is suddenly at the mercy of an enemy intent on their destruction. After witnessing the demise of his troops, Napoleon is left by his captors to die in the desert. Through him we enter the conflicted mind of a warrior as he tries to survive against all odds, as he seeks to make sense of a lifetime of senseless wars and to reckon with the reasons a man would choose a life on the battlefield. Olmstead, an award-winning writer, has created a tightly wound novel that is as moving as it is terrifying.

Far Bright Star

“The year was 1873 and all about was the evidence of boom and bust, shattered dreams, foolish ambition, depredation, shame, greed, and cruelty . . .” Onto this broken Western stage rides Michael Coughlin, a Civil War veteran with an enigmatic past, come to town to settle his dead brother’s debt. Together with his widowed sister-in-law, Elizabeth, bankrupted by her husband’s folly and death, they embark on a massive, and hugely dangerous, buffalo hunt. Elizabeth hopes to salvage something of her former life and the lives of the hired men and their families who now depend on her; the buffalo hunt that her husband had planned, she now realizes, was his last hope for saving the land. Elizabeth and Michael plunge south across the aptly named “dead line” demarcating Indian Territory from their home state of Kansas. Nothing could have prepared them for the dangers: rattlesnakes, rabies, wildfire, lightning strikes, blue northers, flash floods—and human treachery. With the Comanche in winter quarters, Elizabeth and Michael are on borrowed time, and the cruel work of harvesting the buffalo is unraveling their souls. Bracing, direct, and quintessentially American, Olmstead’s gripping narrative follows that infamous hunt, which drove the buffalo to near extinction. Savage Country is the story of a moment in our history in which mass destruction of an animal population was seen as a road to economic salvation. But it’s also the intimate story of how that hunt changed Michael and Elizabeth forever.

A Novel

Savage Country

Coal Black Horse

From young love to the Korean War, a boy’s coming of age is wrought with shattering trials in this “riveting, thoughtful and . . . harrowing” novel (The Washington Post). A Publishers Weekly Best Book of the Year Henry Childs is just seventeen when he falls into a love affair so intense it nearly destroys him. To escape the wrath of the young girl’s father, Henry joins the Marines, arriving in Korea on the eve of the brutal battle of the Chosin Reservoir—the defining moment of the Korean War. There he confronts an enemy force far beyond the scope of his imagining, but the challenges he meets upon his return home, scarred and haunted, are greater by far. From the steamy streets of New Orleans to the bone-chilling Korean landscape, award-winning author Robert Olmstead takes us into one of the most physically challenging battles in history, as well as an electrifying, all-consuming love affair.

The Coldest Night

Tierra salvaje

Caballo negro carbón

Lejana estrella brillante

When Robey Childs's mother experiences a premonition about her husband, a Civil War soldier, she sends her only son to retrieve his father from the battlefield, accompanied by a horse that becomes his only companion as he makes his way through the destruc

Eddie Ryan, haiku poet, Vietnam veteran, and town mortician of Inverawe, New Hampshire, sps his days slipping hand-written poems into the pockets of the departed, keeping lists of bizarre local deaths, and protecting his wife and children from his own fear and anxiety. Then, one snowy Christmas eve, a gypsy logger named Cody steers his truck onto Ryan's front lawn--with the accidentally bisected corpse of his partner strapped to his plow. Cody, garrulous and grieving, wins Eddie's sympathy and a place to stay. Soon, Eddie and Cody find themselves sping time together fishing, hunting, drinking, and unraveling the secrets of their Inverawe neighbors, including the most troubling mystery of all--who is stealing the hearts from Eddie's corpses and why. A Trail of Heart's Blood Wherever We Go is vintage Olmstead: lyrical, heady, and full of hard-won wisdom.

Trail of Hearts Blood Wherever We Go

More than 150 lessons for writers emulate the techniques of the masters who have "built" great narratives through a multitude of small but significant moves in their craft.

Elements of the Writing Craft

Robert Olmstead has peopled his fiction with the rough-hewn farmers, loggers and hired hands of rural New England mountain towns where getting drunk, getting into fights, and getting thrown out of bars are the normal rites of passage. In STAY HERE WITH ME he draws from his own experience as he journeys back to his youth on his grandfather's dairy farm in New Hampshire to confront the ghosts that continue to afflict him. He lays bare the acute pain of his father's alcoholism and the shattering decline of his grandfather. He traces the flowering of his love for a woman. And throughout, there is the land that his family has worked for six generations.

A Memoir

Stay Here with Me

"Gleaming, spellbinding fiction . . . Terrifying and abruptly beautiful, the new novel gleams with a masculine intensity; it is hard to read and hard to put down."—The Cleveland Plain Dealer The year is 1916. The enemy, Pancho Villa, is elusive. Terrain is unforgiving. Through the mountains and across the long dry stretches of Mexico, Napoleon Childs, an aging cavalryman, leads an expedition of inexperienced horse soldiers on seemingly fruitless searches. Though he is seasoned at such missions, things go terribly wrong, and his patrol is suddenly at the mercy of an enemy intent on their destruction. After witnessing the demise of his troops, Napoleon is left by his captors to die in the desert. Through him we enter the conflicted mind of a warrior as he tries to survive against all odds, as he seeks to make sense of a lifetime of senseless wars and to reckon with the reasons a man would choose a life on the battlefield. Olmstead, an award-winning writer, has created a tightly wound novel that is as moving as it is terrifying.

A la muerte de su marido David en un accidente, Elizabeth Coughlin descubre que la granja que ambos han luchado por levantar está hipotecada y en bancarrota. Son los años posteriores a la Guerra Civil, y las plagas y los especuladores han empobrecido a muchas familias del Oeste. Con ayuda del hermano de David, Michael Coughlin, un aventurero de oscuro pasado que ha vuelto tras años de ausencia, Elizabeth concibe un proyecto casi temerario: una expedición más allá de territorio indio para cazar bisontes y hacer una fortuna en medio del desierto más inhóspito del país. Tierra salvaje reconstruye la época de las grandes matanzas que diezmaron al bisonte americano y narra, con una prosa de gran potencia y lirismo, la epopeya de las caravanas en la segunda mitad del siglo XIX, dentro de una historia personal de amor, lucha y sacrificio. Su autor, Robert Olmstead, ha sido comparado con Ernest Hemingway, Cormac McCarthy y John Edward Williams. Tierra salvaje es su primer libro traducido al español. «Olmstead es un estilista inmensamente dotado, dueño de una escritura capaz de transmitir la magia y la pasión del primer amor, así como la ferocidad de la batalla. También tiene un don para crear imágenes tan memorables como inesperadas». The Washington Post «Olmstead es un novelista, un gran novelista» New York Times «Un logro literario... » New York Journal of Books «Olmstead es un estilista inmensamente dotado» The Washington Post «Olmstead tiene una personalidad dickensiana...» The New York Times Book Review Robert Olmstead (Westmoreland, New Hampshire, 1954) estudió en la Universidad de Siracusa junto con Raymond Carver y Tobias Wolff, y actualmente es profesor de escritura creativa en diversos centros universitarios. Su obra narrativa incluye una decena de títulos, entre los que destacan River Dogs, A Trail of Heart’s Blood Wherever We Go y Coal Black Horse, con la que obtuvo en 2008, junto con el reconocimiento del público, los premios Ohaiana Book Award y Western Writers of America Spur, además del Heartland Prize que otorga el Chicago Tribune. Su novela Far Bright Star fue incluida por Booklist entre los diez mejores westerns de la década. La crítica ha destacado su capacidad para «traducir en palabras la naturaleza reveladora de la belleza».

Robert Olmstead

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