Speer Morgan: 7 books

The Oklahoma Territory was a bleak, brutal place in 1894, and Speer Morgan’s compelling novel begins, appropriately enough, with a botched public hanging. Witnessing this unsettling ritual is Tom Freshour, a striking half-Indian who knows nothing of the world beyond the orphanage where he’s been...

(Winner of a 1999 American Book Award and 1999 Oklahoma Book Award finalist.) Tom Freshour needs a vacation. It’s the dusty, hot summer of 1934, and he’d like to escape both the heat in western Arkansas and his cases at the county prosecutor’s office for the calm and solitude of a fishing...

Certain facts about Belle Starr are known and recorded. When she was young the outlaw Cole Younger seduced her, got her pregnant, and abandoned her. Dressing in plumes and Stetson, she took on the role of a fallen woman, theatrically and publicly. Yet in the manner of all true rebels, she took on...

Speer Morgan shares his powerful memories through short fiction that moves from the sloughs of mid-Arkansas to the fifth floor of a wholesale hardware company that overlooks Indian Territory, to a house haunted by a bad cat, to the living room of a woman suffering the worst headache of her life, to...

A coon hunter stumbles onto a trailer full of brightly lit computer terminals… and one electrocuted corpse. A cop stops a car with the drug-wired daughter of the president of DataForm — a transplanted Silicon Valley security firm. There is something rotten in Dubois, Arkansas. An...

War is never more horrifying, and perhaps never more compelling, than when experienced firsthand. The personal accounts collected here — diaries and memoirs written by men on the front lines — constitute a little-known history of American wars. Seven individual narratives cover seven different...

The God Pocket as a collection grapples with issues of light and dark, mortality, and epiphany. In “The Fool-Killer,” a teenager encounters adolescent heartbreak for the first time, while in “The Girl,” a troubling moment of intimacy catalyzes a man’s haunting obsession. “The Big Bang”...