The Bayou Trilogy: Under the Bright Lights, Muscle for the Wing, and The Ones You Do (59 page)
Read The Bayou Trilogy: Under the Bright Lights, Muscle for the Wing, and The Ones You Do Online
Authors: Daniel Woodrell
Back Bay Books
Available wherever paperbacks are sold
CONTENTS
Part I: Criminentlies (cry-men-ent-lees)
Also by Daniel Woodrell: Winter’s Bone
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
D
ANIEL
W
OODRELL
was born in the Missouri Ozarks, left school and enlisted in the marines the week he turned seventeen, received his bachelor’s degree at age twenty-seven, graduated from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and spent a year on a Michener Fellowship. He is the author of eight novels, the five most recent of which were selected as
New York Times
Notable Books of the Year, and
Tomato Red
won the PEN West Award for fiction in 1999. He lives in the Ozarks near the Arkansas border with his wife, Katie Estill.
Winter’s Bone
The Death of Sweet Mister
Tomato Red
Give Us a Kiss: A Country Noir
Woe to Live On
(reissued as
Ride with the Devil
)
“Daniel Woodrell is that infrequent thing, a born writer. His is a style both brutal and touched with poetry. And it’s very much his own. Don’t miss it.”
—Philadelphia Inquirer
“Daniel Woodrell writes with insistent rhythm and an evocative and poetic regional flavor.”
—The New Yorker
“Daniel Woodrell has quietly built a career that should be the envy of most American novelists today.”
—Washington Times
“Put Woodrell on the shelf alongside Faulkner, Jim Thompson, and Cormac McCarthy…. Mr. Woodrell has earned himself a piece of immortality.”
—George Pelecanos
“A backcountry Shakespeare…. The inhabitants of Daniel Woodrell’s fiction often have a streak that’s not just mean but savage; yet physical violence does not dominate his books. What does dominate is a seasoned fatalism…. Woodrell has tapped into a novelist’s honesty, and lucky for us, he’s remorseless that way.”
—Los Angeles Times
“Daniel Woodrell writes in sentences that could be ancient carvings on a tree.”
—Chicago Tribune
“Daniel Woodrell is stone brilliant—a Bayou Dutch Leonard, steeped in rich Louisiana language.”
—James Ellroy
“Daniel Woodrell is the least-known major writer in the country right now.”
—Dennis Lehane,
USA Today
“Woodrell writes books so good they make me clench my fists in jealousy and wonder, both at his talent and because nobody seems to have heard of him.”
—Esquire
“A master craftsman…. Daniel Woodrell is one of the very few I refer to again and again to learn how true poetic writing is achieved…. I would love to devote a whole novel to just quoting from his work. There are crime writers… literary writers… and then Daniel Woodrell. Nobody comes near his amazing genius and I very much doubt anyone ever will.”
—Ken Bruen
ACCLAIM FOR UNDER THE BRIGHT LIGHTS
“Sly and powerful.”
—John D. MacDonald
“Poetic prose and raw dialogue… dark-hued suspense.”
—Washington Post Book World
“A gritty, atmospheric slice of crime fiction…. As steamy as the bayou country that is its setting…. A superior piece of narrative noir.”
—Kirkus Reviews
“A flawless novel…. Vitality pulses from this perfectly paced book.”
—San Francisco Examiner
ACCLAIM FOR MUSCLE FOR THE WING
“Off-the-wall characters, quirky and bizarre, yet as authentic as any I’ve ever met in a novel. Woodrell succeeds—in fact triumphs… and spins a hell of a yarn to boot.”
—Washington Post Book World
“The colorful characters and piquant tongues in which they speak really have us swooning…. All offer hot-breathed testimony to the human gumbo that is St. Bruno.”
—New York Times
“Woodrell does for the Ozarks what Raymond Chandler did for Los Angeles or Elmore Leonard did for Florida.”
—Los Angeles Times
“Vicious, colloquial, dark, and—most surprisingly—brutally funny. To read it is to enter a superbly realized universe of surprises.”
—James Ellroy
ACCLAIM FOR THE ONES YOU DO
“Characters as screwy and dangerous as any in Elmore Leonard, and a sense of pace and language that never warns you whether a scene or sentence will end in a burst of poetry or a hail of bullets.”
—Kirkus Reviews
“Fine writing…. Deeply atmospheric and oozing with the mojo of the swamp… Woodrell’s work echoes that of William Kennedy, William Faulkner, and Walter Mosley.”
—Chicago Tribune
“The pages snap, crackle, and pop. Woodrell’s writing reminds me of the late, great John D. MacDonald, the kind of keen eye for the local detail, but he walks his own walk and talks his own talk.”
—Barry Gifford
Under the Bright Lights
Copyright © 1986 by Daniel Woodrell
Muscle for the Wing
Copyright © 1988 by Daniel Woodrell
The Ones You Do
Copyright © 1992 by Daniel Woodrell
All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher.
Mulholland Books
Little, Brown and Company
Hachette Book Group
237 Park Avenue
New York, NY 10017
First eBook Edition: April 2011
Mulholland Books is an imprint of Little, Brown and Company. The Mulholland Books name and logo are trademarks of Hachette Book Group, Inc.
The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author
The publisher is not responsible for websites (or their content) that are not owned by the publisher.
ISBN: 978-0-316-19055-8