Ron Hansen Books In Order

Novels

  1. Desperadoes (1979)
  2. The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (1983)
  3. The Shadowmaker (1987)
  4. Mariette in Ecstasy (1991)
  5. Atticus (1996)
  6. Hitler’s Niece (1999)
  7. Isn’t It Romantic? (2002)
  8. Exiles (2008)
  9. A Wild Surge of Guilty Passion (2011)
  10. The Kid (2016)

Collections

  1. You Don’t Know What Love Is (1987)
  2. Nebraska (1988)
  3. She Loves Me Not (2012)

Anthologies edited

  1. A Poetic Calm After the Desert Storm (1991)
  2. You’ve Got to Read This (1994)

Non fiction

  1. A Stay Against Confusion (2001)

Novels Book Covers

Collections Book Covers

Anthologies edited Book Covers

Non fiction Book Covers

Ron Hansen Books Overview

Desperadoes

At age 65, Emmett Dalton, the sole survivor of the infamous Dalton gang makes a living by selling his outrageous adventure stories to Hollywood. Desperadoes details his memories of the murders, bootlegging and thievery he and his posse committed. The grit and excitement of these violent times are expertly evoked by the sharp pen and authentic voice of HarperCollins’ bestselling author Ron Hansen.

The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford

Jesse James was a fabled outlaw, a charismatic, spiritual, larger than life bad man whose bloody exploits captured the imagination and admiration of a nation hungry for antiheroes. Robert Ford was a young upstart nobody torn between dedicated worship and murderous jealousy, the ‘dirty little coward’ who coveted Jesse’s legend. The powerful, strange, and unforgettable story of their interweaving paths and twin destinies that would collide in a rain of blood and betrayal is a story of America in all her rough, conflicted glory and the myths that made her.

The Shadowmaker

The Shadow MakerI replace old shadows with new ones, plump shadows with lean ones, shabby shadows with spiffy ones,’ The Shadowmaker tells the townspeople. Soon everyone is parading around with brand new shadows everyone, that is, except Drizzle and her grouchy brother, Soot, who can’t afford them. Then Drizzle decides to do a little investigating to learn The Shadowmaker‘s secrets. But The Shadowmaker is a wily old magician, and his shadows aren’t exactly what he promised. Drizzle must use a little magic of her own to set things right again.

Mariette in Ecstasy

The highly acclaimed and provocatively rendered story of a young postulant’s claim to divine possession and religious ecstasy.

Atticus

Ron Hansen’s deeply affecting new novel opens in winter on the high plains of Colorado, where rancher Atticus Cody receives an unexpected visit from his wayward young son. An artist and wanderer, Scott has recently settled into a life of heavy drinking and recklessness among expatriates and Mexicans in the little town of Resurreccion on the Caribbean coast. Weeks later, Atticus himself goes down to Mexico to recover the body of his son, thinking he has committed suicide. Puzzled by what he finds in Resurreccion, he begins to suspect that Scott has been murdered. Atticus is the story of a father’s fierce love for his son, a love so steadfast and powerful that it bends the impersonal forces of destiny to its own will. As Atticus uncovers the story of his son’s death, fitting together the pieces of the mosaic that was Scott’s life in Mexico and encountering a group of disturbing characters along the way he suffers a father’s grief and rage, but is driven forward in his quest to understand by the even more powerful force of a father’s love. Written in the sensuous prose style of Ron Hansen’s earlier works of fiction, Atticus is a suspenseful murder mystery, as vivid and precise in its imagery as the highly acclaimed Mariette in Ecstasy. Illuminating those often obscure chambers of the human heart, Atticus is finally a novel about deeply rooted, almost unfathomable love, a mystery that Ron Hansen’s fiction explores with a passion and intensity no reader will be able to resist.

Hitler’s Niece

In September 1931, a 23 year old woman was found dead in the Munich flat owned by Adolf Hitler, an unfinished letter on her desk and his handgun on the floor beside her. She was Geli Raubal, the daughter of Hitler’s widowed half sister, and, as Hitler later melodramatically claimed, the only woman he ever loved.

Although he had known of Geli since her birth, he was aloof from his Austrian family during his first years as head of the struggling Na*zi Party. But in 1927, six years before he became chancellor, Hitler invited his half sister to become housekeeper of his alpine home in Obersalzberg and to bring along her daughter, offering to pay for Geli’s medical studies at the university in Munich. Seeing his niece on a daily basis, he soon fell jealously in love, for Geli was, as Hitler’s friends later said, ‘an enchantress,’ pretty, fun loving, witty, flirtatious, and able, as no one else was, to put her strange, high strung uncle at ease.

In a carefully researched historical novel that is haunting, unflinching, shocking, profound, and as compulsively readable as a psychological thriller, Ron Hansen presents Adolf Hitler as he has never before been seen in fiction, but as his intimates must have seen him. And through the eyes of a favorite niece who has been all but lost to history, we see the frightening rise in prestige and political power of a vain, vulgar, sinister man who thrived on hate and cruelty and would stop at nothing to keep the horror of his inner life hidden from the world.

Hitler’s Niece is a masterpiece, a luminous, suspenseful, beautifully crafted novel, full of passion, events, and insight, that reinforces Ron Hansen’s growing reputation as one of our foremost writers of fiction.

Isn’t It Romantic?

Once again, acclaimed novelist Ron Hansen demonstrates his masterful versatility as a writer, with Isn’t It Romantic??, a screwball comedy in the tradition of filmmaker Preston Sturges. In this charming entertainment, mistaken identities, botched schemes, and hilarious misunderstandings all play a part as Parisian sophistication collides with the affability and simple pleasures of the Great Plains. Touring America was Natalie’s idea. But she had not planned on being accompanied on a cross country bus by her playboy fianc , Pierre. Nor had they anticipated being stranded in Seldom, Nebraska, population 395. But that is exactly what happens to this French couple, and they quickly find themselves being taken in by the obliging citizens of Seldom: Natalie by Mrs. Christiansen, a retired high school teacher who runs a rooming house for women, and Pierre by Owen, a gas station owner and ambitious winemaker in an unlikely part of the world. And here also, the separated couple become enchanted by the locals. Natalie is soon being wooed by Dick Tupper, a handsome and honest rancher with a rambling farmhouse and lots of wide open space. Pierre falls quickly for Iona, a beautiful, no nonsense waitress in the local diner. Soon everyone is hatching plots to get what they want: Owen needs help from Pierre’s world class wine business if he is ever going to sell his Nebraska vintage; Pierre wants Iona; Natalie thinks she wants Dick Tupper, but maybe it’s Dick who wants Iona, and Natalie who wants Pierre? The fun and surprises are many in this playful romance.

Exiles

With Exiles, Ron Hansen tells the story of a notorious shipwreck that prompted Gerard Manley Hopkins to break years of elected silence with an outpouring of dazzling poetry. In December 1875 the steamship Deutschland left Bremen, bound for England and then America. On board were five young nuns who, exiled by Bismarck’s laws against Catholic religious orders, were going to begin their lives anew in Missouri. Early one morning, the ship ran aground in the Thames and more than sixty lives were lost including those of the five nuns. Hopkins was a Jesuit seminarian in Wales, and he was so moved by the news of the shipwreck that he wrote a grand poem about it, his first serious work since abandoning a literary career at Oxford to become a priest. He too would die young, an exile from the literary world. But as Hansen s gorgeously written account of Hopkins s life makes clear, he fulfilled his calling. Combining a thrilling tragedy at sea with the seeming shipwreck of Hopkins s own life, Exiles joins Hansen s Mariette in Ecstasy called an astonishingly deft and provocative novel by The New York Times as a novel that dramatizes the passionate inner search of religious life and makes it accessible to us in the way that only great art can.

A Wild Surge of Guilty Passion

A novel set in the fast living New York of the 1920s, that follows two lovers in a torrid affair on an arc of murder and sexual self destruction.

You Don’t Know What Love Is

Compiled, with a preface, by Ron Hansen: twenty four stories about love of all kinds. Includes Margaret Atwood, Charles Baxter, Raymond Carver, Andre Dubus, Amy Hempel, John Irving, David Leavitt, Bobbie Ann Mason, Joyce Carol Oates, John Updike, and Tobias Wolff.

Nebraska

The resonant diction and razor sharp storytelling of Hansen’s earlier books echo through Nebraska. These 11 gemlike tales range from the blue heart of the blizzard of 1888 to the sweltering jungles of war.

You’ve Got to Read This

Thirty four of America’s most distinguished fiction writers including Oscar Hijuelos, John Irving, and Joyce Carol Oates introduce the short stories that inspired them most.

A Stay Against Confusion

In the tradition of Flannery O’Connor and Andre Dubus, A Stay Against Confusion explores the role that religious belief and literature play in one writer’s life. All creative writing is, in the words of Robert Frost, ‘A Stay Against Confusion.’ It tries to find a harmony and order that we only fleetingly detect beneath the chaos of everyday life, and to point out motivations and causalities in what seem to be random and often meaningless acts. Religion has also functioned in this way for Ron Hansen, and it shares with literature both a reverence for mystery and the use of metaphor to communicate another order that we will never fully perceive or comprehend. In this rich and deeply felt collection of essays, Hansen talks about his novels, his childhood and family, and about such mentors as John Gardner. He explores prayer, stigmata, twentieth century martyrs, and the Eucharist. A profile of his grandfather, a ‘tough as nails, brook no guff Colorado rancher,’ finds a place alongside a wonderfully informative portrait of Saint Ignatius of Loyola. A brilliant reading of a story by Leo Tolstoy follows an appreciation of the poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins. A surprisingly intimate book, A Stay Against Confusion brings together the literary and religious impulses that inform the life of one of our most gifted fiction writers.

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