The Collected Works of Billy the Kid, Michael Ondaatje
The Collected Works of Billy the Kid, Michael Ondaatje
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The Collected Works of Billy the Kid

Author: Michael Ondaatje

Narrator: Stefan Rudnicki

Unabridged: 1 hr 47 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download (DRM Protected)

Published: 08/17/2009

Synopsis

From the Booker Prize–winning author of The English Patient comes a visionary novel about an icon of American violence.William Bonney a.k.a. “Billy the Kid,” killed his first man when he was twelve. By the time he was twenty-one he had, by his own reckoning, slain nineteen more. In the intervening years he had become “Billy the Kid,” bloodthirsty ogre and outlaw saint.Drawing on contemporary accounts, period photographs, dime novels and his own fund of empathy and imagination, Michael Ondaatje imagines Billy’s passage across the blasted landscape of 1880s New Mexico and the collective unconscious of his country. The Collected Works of Billy the Kid is a virtuoso synthesis of storytelling, history, and myth by a writer who brings us back to our familiar legends with a renewed sense of wonder.

About Michael Ondaatje

MICHAEL ONDAATJE is the author of six previous novels, a memoir, a nonfiction book on film, and several books of poetry. The English Patient won the Booker Prize; Anil's Ghost won the Irish Times International Fiction Prize, the Giller Prize, and the Prix Médicis. Born in Sri Lanka, Michael Ondaatje now lives in Toronto.

About Stefan Rudnicki

Stefan Rudnicki is a Grammy-winning audiobook producer and an award-winning narrator who has won several Audie Awards and been named one of AudioFile’s Golden Voices. A longtime fan of Weird fiction, and of Robert W. Chambers in particular, Stefan’s dramatic adaptation of The King in Yellow received the Madolin Cervantes Award from the Society of Stage Directors & Choreographers and was staged by him at the Donnell Library Center in New York City.

About Gabrielle de Cuir

Gabrielle de Cuir is a Grammy-nominated and Audie Award-winning producer whose narration credits include the voice of Valentine in Orson Scott Card’s Ender novels, Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Tombs of Atuan, and Natalie Angier’s Woman, for which she was awarded AudioFile magazine’s Golden Earphones Award. She lives in Los Angeles where she also directs theatre and presently has several projects in various stages of development for film.

Reviews

Goodreads review by Michael on September 24, 2017

This is a portrait of Billy the Kid as reflected in a thousand pieces of a shattered mirror. The book is composed of vignettes, poems, photos, and fragments of prose, each of which is a little stroke of brilliance and all of which together paint an incredibly rich, violent, and moving portrait of th......more

Goodreads review by mark on March 13, 2016

avant-garde, postmodern, revisionist, a deconstruction, self-conscious and self-aware, prose from another planet, beautifully brutal, the kind of spikey poetry you see in some of the books of Hawke or even some DeLillo (i'm thinking Libra), the kind of book that you read and reread and remember fore......more

Goodreads review by Jeffrey on June 17, 2021

Brilliant!......more

Goodreads review by April on May 19, 2018

I read this book years ago, and it is definitely one I won't forget. I love the legend of Billy the Kid, so to see it told through prose and candor and photographs was really interesting.A great Canadian read.......more

Goodreads review by John on December 03, 2007

I'd say this book is like a Terence Malick movie transformed into poetry/prose/a few pictures. It's fragmentary, nebulous, disintegrating, nonsensical, beautiful, weird, scary, quiet, even silent. It's got lots and lots of white space. For a reason. I think it's wonderful and I want to spend even mo......more

Quotes

“Wonderful…Ondaatje’s language is clean and energetic, with the pop of bullets. This is literature, art.” Annie Dillard, Pulitzer Prize–winning and New York Times bestselling author

“The Collected Works of Billy the Kid strains one’s powers of description…Ondaatje’s eye for detail is wonderful and he uses it poetically, with superb restraint.” Larry McMurtry

“Moving and tragic…Ondaatje is a poet and even his prose moves with rhythmic circular precision.” New York Times Book Review

“Ondaatje provides us with a stunning display of his storytelling—visceral, violent, sensuous.” Los Angeles Times

“A compassionate and convincing portrait, not only of a savage individual, but of the casually brutal human wilderness in which Billy was both villain and victim…Sharply conceived and brilliantly carried through.” Times Literary Supplement (London)

“Ondaatje’s novel about Billy the Kid (William Bonney) reads like a diary blended with historical accounts. Stefan Rudnicki strikes a tone that’s thoughtful and poetic, visceral and violent. It serves both the straightforward storytelling and the musings, as when Bonney describes the deaths he has seen or his calm as he ‘burned out’ a fever. While he’s mainly reading as Billy the Kid, interludes in the voices of the others in Bonney’s life let Rudnicki show off his vocal talents. This is fiction, but it feels like it’s real, making for a dramatic listening experience.” AudioFile

“Imagine yourself sitting by a fire, listening to a tale retold by an articulate relative. This is the atmosphere [Ondaatje] creates…Any account of one of the Wild West’s most infamous outlaws can’t fail to excite, and Ondaatje repeatedly finds the striking detail to evince a bygone era of American life. Particularly good is the depiction of Billy’s complicated relationship with his eventual assassin…The clarity and lyricism of this slim volume is well worth the two hours it takes to read.” Kirkus UK

Awards

  • Publishers Weekly Pick
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