What makes a “modern Western”?

In honor of Larry McMurtry’s birthday, we asked our book experts here at the New York Public Library to answer that question — and to name a book they’d recommend that fit into that category. Here’s what they chose.

With her short story masterpiece Close Range: Wyoming Stories, author Annie Proulx pulls the Old West into a stark, modern landscape. Her expansive Wyoming is filled with hardscrabble ranchers and lonely cowboys trying to survive and find happiness among the jagged mountains, grassy plains, and unending sky. Proulx unspools evocative, tight prose and crisp language that’ll have you tasting the dust of Wyoming on your tongue. This collection includes the heartbreakingly beautiful “Brokeback Mountain.” —Anne Rouyer, Mulberry Street

 

 

 

Blood Meridian, or, The Evening Redness in the West by Cormac McCarthy. This isn’t your grandfather’s Western. There’s no singing songs by the warm light of a campfire. There’s no cattle rustlin’ by clean cut square jawed cowboys. This visceral modern classic is dark and violent and bloody. —Billy Parrott, Mid-Manhattan

 

 

 

 

 

Patrick deWitt’s The Sisters Brothers plays with the tropes, plots, and settings of the Western, but his otherworldly imagery, well-realized characters, and exploration of family bonds make the novel a fresh and modern take on the genre. —Meredith Mann, Manuscripts, Archives, and Rare Books

 

 

 

 

 

I interpret “modern Western” as stories that subvert the colonialist tradition of “cowboys versus Indians,” of the virtuous hero battling the bad, horde-like “other.” Modern Westerns bend genres and feature complex (sometimes morally ambiguous) protagonists that are often women or people of color, groups traditionally relegated to subservient or villainous roles. One of my favorites is Pretty Deadly, a feminist Western comic by creative team Kelly Sue DeConnick, Emma Rios, and Jordie Bellaire. Pretty Deadly draws strongly on elements of magical realism, mythology, and folklore and tells the story of Deathface Ginny, a reaper of vengeance that inhabits the world between life and death. —Crystal Chen, Muhlenberg

 

 

 

I’m going to go with East of West by Jonathan Hickman. Set in a dystopian United States, the Civil War seems to have never ended, as the Four Horseman of the Apocalypse follow prophecies all over God’s Earth. —Joe Pascullo, Grand Central

 

 

 

 

 

 

In Twilight, William Gay’s excellent Southern Gothic novel set in the backwoods of 1950s Tennessee, a bootlegger’s son is on the run from a hired assassin. The law has failed him, his family is gone; the only things that can protect him are the ruined landscape he flees through, and the kindness of strangers he encounters along his way. —Isaiah Pittman, Inwood

 

 

 

 

“Modern Western” makes me think of Gene Roddenberry and his concept of Star Trek as “Wagon Train to the Stars,” after the original television series he developed, as well as today’s science-fiction authors who write “space Westerns.” In Paul Pope’s Battling Boy and Aurora West, the characters fight monsters but with a gritty, loner, quasi-European kitsch that evokes both science-fiction and Westerns for me. —Jenny Baum, Jefferson Market

 

 

 

 

No Country for Old Men by Cormac McCarthy. The horse and cattle thieves and train robbers are replaced with drug smugglers, making a modern-day Western set on the US Mexico border. —Jessica Dawn Jackson, Mid-Manhattan

 

 

 

 

 

 

Craig Johnson’s Walt Longmire series. Longmire is a sheriff in modern-day Wyoming who deals with tensions between his town’s inhabitants and the local American Indian tribes while solving murder mysteries in the wilds of Absaroka County. —Joshua Soule, Spuyten Duyvil

 

 

 

 

Louise Erdrich has been the premiere chronicler of modern Native American lives in the modern American west for the last 30 years. Her novel, The Round House, is a story with echoes of the traditional Western adventure genre — tensions between white and native communities, masculinity, violence, frontier law, vigilantism — but the perspective is flipped. The protagonists are Ojibwe, and Ojibwe concepts of society, family, and justice define the decisions they make in their lives. —David Nochimson, Pelham Parkway-Van Nest Library

 

 

 

A fourth-generation Montana rancher recounts the struggles of living in one of the last parts of the United States to get electricity in her memoir, Breaking Clean. This is a story not just of Judy Blunt and her struggles in the narrowly defined, male-dominated Old West, but of a place of raw, dangerous, wild beauty. When she breaks tradition and shocks her community and family by leaving her husband and farm, she becomes even more of a western woman by seeking out the difficult and the unknown. —Maura Muller, Volunteer Office

 

 

 

 

C.J. Box writes a good Western novel. His Joe Pickett series features a trail-riding game warden in Wyoming whose best friend is a former black ops falconer named Nate. The clear crisp air of the mountains and the tang of gun oil and black powder run through these novels. Protecting the wilderness, the game, the public, and his family from law-breaking hunters, ranchers, and politicians is Joe Pickett’s mission. The first book in the series is Open Season (2001). —Virginia Bartow, Special Formats

 

 

 

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Staff picks are chosen by NYPL staff members and are not intended to be comprehensive lists. We'd love to hear your ideas too, so leave a comment and tell us what you’d recommend. And check out our Staff Picks browse tool for more recommendations!