Limo

Decades before it saturated the airwaves, Dan Jenkins and Bud Shrake actually invented reality TV--and skewered it into a comic novel that was way ahead of its time. Frank Mallory is a big gun at one of the four major networks. Cruising around Manhattan in his "Silver Goblet," a Rolls Royce limo, he finds that life in the fast lane is beginning to unravel. Having to deal with the departure of his wife, his boss "The Big Guy," and crazed Hollywood stars--while at the same time having to maintain a high-stakes job--all tend to make Frank Mallory, well, act out. After Frank struggles to fill all his number-four network's prime-time slots--it tends to lag behind CBS, NBC, and ABC--the Big Guy forces him to create a show called "Just Up The Street," which is meant to entertain ordinary Americans with the "real" lives of other ordinary Americans. Ultimately the resulting script causes the Big Guy's downfall and forces everyone else to return to a reality that comes without scare quotes. Limo is a hilarious, entertaining caricature of the lifestyle of the rich and famous, and provides a fascinating insight into the world of network television. Through a haze of booze and drugs, we see Frank's desperation for a normal life and real relationships. Frank Mallory's only true relationships are found in the confines of his Silver Goblet, where he finds friendship with D. Wayne Cooper and love with Sally Hawks. Only after a series of crises does Frank ultimately find himself--and the happiness that has eluded him. Originally published in 1976, Limo is now back in print, complete with a foreword from acclaimed author Jeff Guinn.

Edwin Shrake

Dan Jenkins

Pocket

A young Confederate captain with a grisly past as a cavalry raider in Tennessee is on his way home to his family plantation north of Houston in the last days of the Civil War. In Austin, Capt. Jerod Robin is accused of murder and is thrown into the stockade by U.S. Army Capt. Santana Leatherwood, a Texan whose family has feuded bitterly for decades with the Robin family. In the stockade Robin meets British novelist and adventurer Edmund Varney, in Austin to write the life story of Lt. Tom Custer, heroic younger brother of famous General George Armstrong Custer. Varney is charged with attempting to steal Tom Custer's legendary warhorse, Athena, upon whose back Custer recently won two Congressional Medals of Honor. The two prisoners stand trial beside a 16-year-old mulatto girl, Flora Bowprie, who has come from New Orleans searching for her father but has been arrested as a runaway slave. Homicidal events cause the rebel captain, the British author and the young fortuneteller to flee from a Cavalry squad led by Santana Leatherwood and Tom Custer, mounted on his great Arabian horse. The story races to the inevitable showdown between the Robins and Leatherwoods, two families on opposite sides in the Civil War. But, before the final confrontation Jerod Robin hears a dark accusation about his birth and his mother that lends a special ferocity to the showdown. Then the story of "Custer's Brother's Horse" takes a surprising twist. This is a horse for the ages.

Custer's Brother's Horse

Literature & Fiction

Contemporary

John M. Hardy Publishing Company

A tale of high adventure of the first order, with some of the most memorable characters to be found in the literature of the Old West. Selected by A.C. Greene as on of THE 50 BEST BOOKS ON TEXAS.

Blessed McGill (Texas Literary Classics)

John M. Hardy Publishing Co.

A TV western star quits his successful series and returns to Dallas to make a documentary film that reveals the truth about his home town. His quest forces him to learn if he is capable of using his six-gun for real as he moves from booze and radical politics in oil men's palaces into the infamous Carousel Club and the underworld of arms and dope smuggling in a city ripe for the murder of a President.

Strange Peaches (Texas Literary Classics)

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Edwin Shrake. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Edwin Shrake

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Edwin Shrake. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Limo

Custer's Brother's Horse

Blessed McGill (Texas Literary Classics)

Strange Peaches (Texas Literary Classics)