This Way Slaughter , an original work of literary, biographical fiction about "the Voice of the Texas Revolution" and Commander of the Alamo, William Barret Travis, marks the first and only time that figure has received full-length treatment in a novel. Typically a character portrayed as a rather minor stick figure forfeit to a much larger, unthinkably violent and bloody drama, one overshadowed by more celebrated names like Davy Crockett, Jim Bowie and Sam Houston, Slaughter places the 26-year-old attorney, schoolteacher, editor and diarist centerstage where he is subjected to relentlessly probing, yet empathic scrutiny.
Author Biography:
Reared in the Upper Midwest, Bruce Olds has lived at various periods in New York City, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Miami and Chicago. He is the author of three award-winning works of fiction, the Pulitzer Prize nominated The Moments Lost (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2007), Bucking the Tiger (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2001 ) and the Pulitzer Prize Finalist, Raising Holy Hell (Henry Holt, 1995). His nonfiction work has appeared in Granta and American Heritage among other publications. His book reviews have been published in the Chicago Tribune, the Los Angeles Times and the Miami Herald. After working his way through college as a Teamster, Olds worked for several years at daily newspapers, first in Philadelphia, then in Baltimore, as an award-winning columnist, feature writer, and book reviewer, before leaving the business mid-career to devote himself full time to writing fiction. His sui generis approach to his historical fictions—one that is genre-blurring, multi-dimensional, frankly collagist, and that privileges language and architecture over strict historicity—is, he suspects, in part the result of his having as an undergraduate studied under and been influenced by the pioneering literary Postmodernist scholar Ihab Hassan. Olds’s novel about the abolitionist John Brown, Raising Holy Hell, was an IMPAC Dublin Literary Award nominee, amd was named Novel of the Year by the Notable Books Council of the American Library Association. It also received the Quality Paperback Book Club’s New Voices Award for Fiction. Bucking the Tiger, an ALA Notable Book, was adapted for the stage as “The Confessions of Doc Holliday.” His third, set in turn-of-the-century Chicago and Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, plumbed parts of his own family history. The father of an adult son, Olds lives along the Atlantic Coast of northern South Carolina.
