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TehanoA Novel Published 2006 from Southern Methodist University PressA sprawling epic of the American westering experience set in the years just before and after the Civil War, Tehano brings together a large cast of characters—Comanche braves and their women, profiteers, cowboys, German immigrants, Mexican peasant farmers, buffalo hunters, soldiers on both sides of the great national conflict, runaway slaves, settlers seeking new prospects in Washington Territory—whose lives intersect on the sere and dangerous high plains of Texas. In wonderfully drawn scenes fraught with adventure, suspense, tragedy, and humor, the many disparate skeins of the novel come together at a Comanchero trading place where the stakes are no less than life and death. The major characters are surrounded by a host of minor ones, whose destinies are entwined with theirs and whose individual fates are representative of the fates of all those hardy souls who went West seeking their fortunes, fulfilling the new nation’s Manifest Destiny. Some Praise for Tehano:“This is a novel that sticks. It has the smell of lived life, the rattle of a world long gone. It rouses and compels, not least because Wier has a true yarn, outsize and grand, to tell. His is an American West fetched up whole and mythic, more dust and wind and high sky and idiom per page than anything this side of Larry McMurtry.” —Lee K. Abbott “Tehano is sweetly antiquarian and hip at the same time. I lived it and loved it. Many Comanche and Texan hats off to Allen Wier.” —Barry Hannah “Allen Wier has imagined a way to express an epic vision of the American experiment at its crossroads. From the antebellum era, through the Civil War and Reconstruction, African American freedmen and slaves, Native American warriors and their women, Confederate and Union veterans, immigrants, and citizens high and low who pitch up in Comanche territory in Texas. Wier breathes new life into representative American men and women in a style alive with realism, soaring with lyricism, and vibrant with humor. His understanding of the Native American and the African American experience is stunningly uncanny.” —David Madden "An extraordinary accomplishment: a novel of Tolstoyan scope. Here is the palpable savage young country itself, and its people with all their loves, fears, passions, hopes, dreams and sufferings—human souls searingly brought forth from the swirl of history. It is a great work of fictive Art, and to my mind perhaps the finest achievement of my generation, no less." —Richard Bausch "Tehano is a rich, ambitious, satisfying novel—a long read but a good one." —Larry McMurtry “A wonderful Texas novel. A genuine masterpiece. A magnificent work.” —George Garrett “Tehano is amazing—like some blessed combination of Dickens and Larry McMurtry. Of all the novels I’ve ever read, Allen Wier’s Tehano best exemplifies John Gardner’s famous dictum that a novel should be a ‘continuous dream.’ What a world Allen Wier has created here; what a country this is! His prodigal imagination, his endless energy and boundless understanding have combined to transport me. Tehano is a feat and a treasure.” —Lee Smith |
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