Books with author Charles Portis

Football quickly becomes more than just a game for Alexander Graham Ptuiac, the son of an inventor, when he suddenly manifests superhuman powers during team tryouts. Alex makes the cut, but not before certain nefarious adults take notice, putting his life in danger. He struggles to suppress and control his strange new abilities, worried about exposing his secret and being kicked off the football team. Enter Dex, a diminutive classmate who can somehow jump as high as ten feet in the air. Now, Alex isn't the only one at school with a secret. The only thing stranger than the changes taking over his body (in addition to his new defense against bullies and budding crush) is the shocking truth about himself and his parents. When truth is stranger than fiction, there's only one thing to do. Play ball!

With its excitement, its aliveness, its comic sympathy and originality, True Grit swoops the reader up and gallops him off into a classic American Landscape, freshly and brilliantly perceived.The action – and what action! - begins on page 1, as Mattie Ross, a fourteen year old girl from Dardanelle Arkansas, sets out in the winter of eighteen seventy something to avenge her Daddy, treacherously shot to death by a no-good drunken outlaw. Since not even Mattie ( who is no self-doubter) would ride into Indian Territory alone, she “convinces” one-eyed “Rooster” Cogburn, the meanest available U. S. Marshall, to tag along with her.As Mattie outdickers and outmaneuvers the hard-bitten types whose first reaction is to “run home, little britches, your mama wants you,” as her performance under fire makes them eat their words, her indestructible vitality and harsh innocence by turns amuse, horrify and touch the reader. What happens – to Rooster, to Mattie, to the gang of outlaws unfortunate enough to tangle with her – rings with the dramatic rightness of legend and the marvelous overtones, the continual surprises, of personality.True Grit, is eccentric, cool, straight and unflinching, like Mattie herself, who tells the story a half-century later in a voice that sounds strong and sure enough to outlast us all. It was a voice quite heard before and at the same time instantly recognizably as totally original and totally alive.True Grit is a 1968 novel by Charles Portis that was first published as a 1968 serial in The Saturday Evening Post. The novel is told from the perspective of a woman named Mattie Ross, who recounts the time when she was 14 and sought retribution for the murder of her father by a scoundrel, Tom Chaney. It is considered by some critics to be "one of the great American novels."The novel was adapted for the screenplay of the 1969 film True Grit starring Kim Darby, Glen Campbell, and John Wayne. Six years later, in 1975, Wayne reprised his Academy Award-winning role as the tough hard drinking one-eyed lawman in the sequel film Rooster Cogburn.

At breakfast, the adjutant chancing to sit near me, I asked him who the youthful soldiers were. "They are the sons of Lieutenant-Colonel Burton, Corporals Frank and Henry," he replied. "They hold honorary rank, and are attached to head-quarters, acting as messengers and performing some light clerical work." "How do they happen to be in Santa Fé?" "Mother recently died in the East, and the colonel had them sent here in charge of a tutor who is to fit them for college, I believe." Later, on the same day, being desirous of looking over this ancient Indian and Mexican town, I was making a pedestrian tour of its streets, and chanced to be opposite San Miguel School in the eastern section during the pupils' recess. Half a dozen boys were engaged in throwing the lasso over the posts of the enclosing fence, when suddenly from a side street appeared the young corporals whom I had seen at reveille. The Mexican boys instantly greeted them with derisive shouts and jeers. They called them little Gringos and other opprobrious names, and one young Mexican threw the loop of his lasso over the smaller corporal's head and jerked him off his feet.

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