The University of Alabama Press

A haunting reimagining of Billy the Kid—myth, violence, and regret collide in a lyrical coming-of-age story woven with history, legend, and the omnipresence of birds. Daybreak Birdsong Always Wakes Him: The Lives of Billy the Kid by Pamela Ryder is a coming-of-age saga like no other. It reaches beyond the myth of the reckless and romantic rebel, the murdering gunslinger, and the scrappy outlaw. His story is one of survival, mayhem, and regret. Billy is portrayed as a complex and authentic figure. At times he is ruthless, often sympathetic, always clever and engaging. Yet he remains haunted by loneliness as he rides ever closer to the end of his short and violent life. The child of Irish immigrants, Billy came of age amid hardship and lawlessness, forced to navigate a world that offered him little mercy. From his grim childhood in the tenements of New York to the unforgiving deserts of New Mexico, his journey is marked by loss, chaos, and fleeting moments of grace. He was a boy who became an outlaw, forever running from his past toward an inevitable fate. Told through shifting perspectives and enriched by Billy's keen observations of birds, landscapes, and the lives he has taken, the novel unfolds in lyrical, unflinching prose. His fascination with birds, whose freedom stands in stark contrast to his own doomed flight, threads through the narrative. A meditation on myth, mortality, and the stories we tell about ourselves, Daybreak Birdsong Always Wakes Him is a singular reimagining of the American West. It does not flinch from the blood or the beauty of a life lived on the edge of history.

The stories in John Haskell's Trying to Be wrestle in exhilarating ways with the relationships between fiction and other arts- painting, film, dance- in a manner that feels natural and seamless. Painter, narrator, spectator, reader, writer- it doesn't matter which. What matters is how they speak and think and create in relation to each other, always shifting, always refashioning themselves. Haskell's narrators are porous- to these other art forms, to the past, to other people and characters. It is perhaps this permeability that forms them, and part of what forms the stories themselves.

Belvoir: An Archaeology of Maryland Slavery offers a fascinating account of the Belvoir Quarter for enslaved workers at Belvoir, a 1730's Maryland manor and plantation owned by descendants of Francis Scott Key. Julie M. Schablitsky excavated the brick and stone Belvoir Quarter and found architectural features with layers of artifacts spanning more than eighty years of habitation. Belvoir takes the discovery of the quarter along with its material culture, such as sherds, buttons, tobacco pipe stems, food remains, and spiritual items, and discusses the finds in the context of other similar sites of enslavement.