Melvin Litton

From novelette to flash fiction, snippets of three novels to a final essay, from voices old and young, mixing the ethereal and actual in tales of misadventure, guilt, murder, bigotry, the thrill and angst of a one-night stand, poignant as the breath of evil or memory in ache to breathe, where...

Jack Marshal, known as "the Lion," is a prideful sinner and reckless womanizer. When his 15-year-old daughter, Bonny, winds up pregnant by an old running buddy, Jack is outraged. And when the man is found dead, Jack is charged with murder....

In the summer of 1975, a group of young men known as "the boys" make their stab for freedom harvesting wild hemp, or marijuana, on the Kansas plains. Several are Vietnam vets, and all are somehow marked, at odds with their time....

Riding the crest of the bloody tide is Jim Caspion, a Civil War veteran turned buffalo hunter, a man of notable conscience and courage, ever haunted by the war, yet fleeing settlement and routine, forswearing the practicable for the exotic, the forbidden, and the extreme....

"Melvin Litton takes us to the landscape of the soul where history and myth meet." (Richard Rodriguez, author of Brown: The Last Discovery of America) Before Jesse James or Billy the Kid, there was Joaquín Murrieta - lover, bandit, revolutionary. On July 25, 1853, a troop of California Rangers...

Begins in blood and ends in fire, Nine Lives of Sadie Briar traces one woman's quietly heroic journey through an American century. From an Indian raid on the Kansas frontier in 1869 when she's briefly taken captive as a baby to Christmas Eve 1968 when she witnesses man first orbit the moon...