ABOUT THE BOOK

It's 1852 and a young girl in Texas is kidnapped by Indians. It's 1859 and two toddlers fall off a buckboard heading west: rumor has it they survived and are being raised by coyotes. It's 1874 and a young brave has a vision he is invincible: he will lead his people to disaster. It's 1879 and a black Mississippi sharecropper is terrorized into making the migration west. It's 1890 and we have arrived at Wounded Knee: the West has been subdued.

There have been many versions of how the West was won, but 'Liar's Moon', with its coruscating vision and rowdy vitality, outpaces them all. As it deromanticizes our greatest story, the novel shows how history slid into legend to become - in little more than thirty years - the defining myth of America. With its mix of songs and laments, tall tales, hearsay, and history, 'Liar's Moon' is a true American original, a work of powerful authenticity whose sly, subversive wit is a match for the energy, diversity, and lies that have stitched this nation together.

It is the second novel from a writer of matchless originality. Philip Kimball grew up working on his family's farm in Oklahoma before graduating from the University of Kansas in 1963. Graduate work followed, first as a Woodrow Wilson Fellow and later as a Fulbright Scholar at the University of Heidelberg. A few years of university teaching proved unsatisfying, and he left the academic world to pursue a variety of bluecollar jobs while writing his first novel.

That book, 'Harvesting Ballads', drew critical acclaim. "My personal choice for the finest first novel of 1984," was how George Garrett characterized it. "One of the year's most original novels," said Publishers Weekly. "Like nothing we've heard from this part of the country since Wright Morris first set his plough to break the plains" was Alan Cheuse's verdict. And from Fred Chappell: "You'd think it couldn't be done now, the large loose novel of heartland America with hard-luck cowboys, hard-bitten farmers, hardscrabble Indians. But I know for a fact it can be done because Philip Kimball has done it magnificently."

That was fifteen years ago. Now Philip Kimball is back with his second novel, one that is every bit as riveting and original as his first.