Ron Hansen

A father journeys to a town in Mexico in an effort to learn what drove his son to commit suicide. The father is Atticus Cody, a rich Colorado rancher whose son adopted a beatnik lifestyle on the Gulf Coast. As he investigates, Cody receives a big surprise.

In the tradition of Flannery O'Connor and Andre Dubus, A Stay Against Confusion explores the role that religious belief and literature play in one writer's life. All creative writing is, in the words of Robert Frost, "a stay against confusion." It tries to find a harmony and order that we only fleetingly detect beneath the chaos of everyday life, and to point out motivations and causalities in what seem to be random and often meaningless acts. Religion...

A portrait of a seventeen-year-old postulant at the convent of the Sisters of the Crucifixion in upstate New York who begins to bleed from hands, feet, and side in 1906.

Once again, acclaimed novelist Ron Hansen demonstrates his masterful versatility as a writer, with Isn't It Romantic?, a screwball comedy in the tradition of filmmaker Preston Sturges. In this charming entertainment, mistaken identities, botched schemes, and hilarious misunderstandings all play a part as Parisian sophistication collides with the affability and simple pleasures of the Great Plains. Touring America was Natalie's idea. But she had not...

Ron Hansen's engrossing novel of the violent life and criminal exploits of the Dalton gang, as remembered by its last surviving member From his home in Los Angeles, an aging Emmett Dalton reminisces about his glory days in America's Wild West. Now sixty-five years old, and a Hollywood fixture, he makes a comfortable living selling stories of his earlier exploits to movie studios. But years before, he rode with his two brothers-charming, handsome,...

"A new novel from Ron Hansen, the award-winning author of The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, about an iconic American criminal of the old West: legendary outlaw, Billy the Kid. Born Henry McCarty, Billy the Kid was a diminutive, charming, blond-haired young man who, growing up in New York, Kansas, and later New Mexico, demonstrated a precocious dexterity at firing six-shooters with either hand--a skill that both got him into...

Everyone in 1880s America knows Jesse James. He's the nation's most notorious criminal and is being hunted by the law in 10 states. He's also the land's greatest hero, lauded as a Robin Hood by the public. No one knows of Robert Ford, at least not yet. But the ambitious 19-year-old aims to change that. He befriends Jesse and rides with his gang. And if that doesn't bring Ford fame, he will have to find a deadlier way. Friendship becomes rivalry and...

Somewhere along the mid-nineteenth century American East Coast frontier, two neighboring couples battle hardship and isolation, witnessed by a splendid yet testing landscape, challenging them both physically and psychologically.

The landmark American writer profiles the people of a small Midwestern town during the early 1900s, revealing the potential consequences of human misunderstanding.