Sweet Promised Land, 50th Ed.
The Loom of the Desert

The Ox-Bow Incident

Set in 1885, The Ox-Bow Incident is a searing and realistic portrait of frontier life and mob violence in the American West. First published in 1940, it focuses on the lynching of three innocent men and the tragedy that ensues when law and order are abandoned. The result is an emotionally powerful, vivid, and unforgettable re-creation of the Western novel, which Clark transmuted into a universal story about good and evil, individual and community, justice and human nature. As Wallace Stegner writes, [Clark’s] theme was civilization, and he recorded, indelibly, its first steps in a new country.

More Adult Books

  • A national bestseller, Derf Backderf’s Alex Award winner My Friend Dahmer is the bone-chilling graphic novel that inspired the major motion picture.

  • This unusual book, Fray Angélico Chávez’s personal meditation on his cultural heritage, is also a kind of spiritual autobiography of the Hispano people of New Mexico. The spirit of New Mexico, he feels, grows out of its dry mountain terrain whose hills and valleys resemble those of Spain and of ancient Palestine. Just as this kind of landscape helped the Hebrew shepherd Abraham to find his God, so in Fray Angélico’s view, have New Mexico’s mountains kept her people close to their God. In evoking this special closeness between the divine and the human, the author returns repeatedly to the Penitentes [...]

  • Anna is not sick, but she might as well be. By age thirteen, she has undergone countless surgeries, transfusions, and shots so that her older sister, Kate, can somehow fight the leukemia that has plagued her since childhood. The product of preimplantation genetic diagnosis, Anna was conceived as a bone marrow match for Kate—a life and a role that she has never challenged…until now. Like most teenagers, Anna is beginning to question who she truly is. But unlike most teenagers, she has always been defined in terms of her sister—and so Anna makes a decision that for most would be unthinkable, [...]

  • Reuben Jackson's rhythmic and musical poems merge love, beauty, justice, and the lived Black experience in America.