That Old Ace in the Hole

More about the book

From Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award winner Annie Proulx comes That Old Ace in the Hole, an exhilarating story brimming with language, history, landscape, music, and love. Bob Dollar is a young man from Denver trying to make good in a bad world. Dollar's out of college and aimless, but when he takes a job with Global Pork Rind, he finds a new purpose: scouting out big spreads of land that can be converted to hog farms. Soon he's holed up in a two-bit Texas town called Woolybucket, where he settles into LaVon Fronk's old bunkhouse for fifty dollars a month, helps out at Cy Frease's Old Dog Cafe, and targets Ace and Tater Crouch's ranch for Global Pork -- and learns the hard way how vigorously the old owners will hold on to their land, even when their children want no part of it. Robust, often bawdy, and strikingly original, That Old Ace in the Hole offers an intimate portrait of the waves of change that have shaped the American West over the past century.