Every Man Also

In this gripping first novel by the winner of the 1992 Texas Review Press Southern and Southwestern Writers Breakthrough Award for Fiction, Robert Winship once again sets his story largely on a West Texas ranch, where college athletic director Mase Mason learns a great deal more about himself and human nature than he even suspected. When Mason throws a football game for one hundred thousand dollars, little does he know the chain of events that he has set in motion. He goes to West Texas to the ranch of Raleigh Jones to meet the man who will bring his money, taking with him a female colleague to ensure his own safety. Here Mason and companion Frieda are swept up in the deep passions of the heart as they wait for the stranger from Illinois.

In this transcendent story of a man’s greed turned charity, Robert Winship weaves his tale with the same fine prose he demonstrated in The Brushlanders.

The first of them came in too early and too fast and, because of the gloom of the hour and their unfamiliarity, jarred their frames at the front gate where a dip had been figured into the street. Then they cruised through and back out again, grimy with the grit of the open road, aflutter, and went down the street to Basil’s.

There were eighteen of them at Basil’s then, before seven-thirty, and they ordered coffee and scrambled eggs and sausage and toast. Several were unsteady, and it was these that got a rhythm going with their heads at the tables and began to yell and chant with the rhythm, until Basil came out of the kitchen and stood smiling at them with a slow look in his eyes, and then they quit.