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About
William Bonney, a.k.a. “Billy the Kid,” 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. Drawing on contemporary accounts, period photographs, dime novels and his own 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.
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Reviews
"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
"A compassionate and convincing portrait, not only of a savage individual, but of the casually brutal human wilderness in which Billy was both villain and victim. Sharply conceived and brilliantly carried through."
Times Literary Supplement (London)
"Ondaatje's novel about Billy the Kid (William Bonney) reads like a diary blended with historical accounts. Stefan Rudnicki strikes a tone that's thoughtful and poetic, visceral and violent. It serves both the straightforward storytelling and the musings, as when Bonney describes the deaths he has seen or his calm as he 'burned out' a fever. While he's mainly reading as Billy the Kid, interludes i
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