What to Read After “Lonesome Dove”
Rachel Monroe
A contributing writer covering the Southwest
In Texas, where I live, someone always seems to be reading “Lonesome Dove,” Larry McMurtry’s thrilling, ambivalent Western, first published in 1985. The rest of the country is catching on: the novel sold more copies in 2025 than it had in thirty years, and earlier this year it spiked on Google Trends. And I’m not surprised—“Lonesome Dove” is the kind of romantic, immersive story that gets BookTok going, but McMurtry shades his epic with just the right amount of regret. There’s never a bad time to hunker down with Gus, Call, and the other members of the Hat Creek outfit as they drive a herd of cattle from Texas to Montana, but summer is ideal. Nearly the whole novel takes place outdoors, through a series of vast landscapes that are at once brutal and beautiful. I guarantee you’ll cry at the end.
After it’s over, and you’ve dried your tears, you’ll be tempted to pick up one of the sequels or prequels that McMurtry churned out over the next few decades, to diminishing returns. I wouldn’t advise it. Here are some better options:
If what you want is more of that McMurtry magic:
Published in 1966, “The Last Picture Show” is McMurtry’s third novel. It is a loosely autobiographical chronicle of adolescent lust and despair, set in the fictional Thalia, Texas—a stand-in for McMurtry’s home town—during the nineteen-fifties. Sexy and sad, a classic McMurtry combination.
If you’re after further dissections of Lone Star State mythology:
Carmen Boullosa’s historical fiction “Texas: the Great Theft,” from 2014, is a sprawling tale of nineteenth-century land theft in South Texas that features more than two hundred characters, not all of them human. Cacophonous, gossipy, and action-packed.
If you’re hoping for another story of male friendship amid harrowing circumstances:
“Alive,” by Piers Paul Read, is a journalistic account from 1975 of the Uruguayan high-school rugby team who were on a flight when their plane crashed in the Andes. As they struggle to survive, the teen-agers discover their hidden heroism (and, sometimes, cowardice). Elemental and unexpectedly heartening.
For more: read Monroe on how McMurtry defined and undermined the idea of Texas.
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Jia Tolentino
A staff writer covering culture
As a known booster of the McMurtry masterpiece, I am frequently asked by friends who’ve just finished “Lonesome Dove”: What could possibly come next? What should a person read when she’s book-hungover from an absolutely breathtaking American doorstop and itchy, to the point of desperation, for more of the same? My best answer for this is sort of, actually, low-key . . . “Gone with the Wind.”
Published in 1936, Margaret Mitchell’s epic was my favorite book by the end of elementary school, owing in large part to the indulgent material attention Mitchell pays to the Georgia landscape (“Spring had come early that year, with warm quick rains and sudden frothing of peach blossoms and dogwood dappling with white stars the dark river swamp and far-off hills”) and to Scarlett O’Hara’s wardrobe (I can still recite, like the Lord’s Prayer, her pre-barbecue choice between the rose organdie, the black bombazine, the sprigged muslin, and the green-plaid taffeta with the grease spot on the front of the basque). I’d considered rereading it many times in adulthood, but could never make it past the egregious dialect Mitchell uses for the enslaved characters—one of many, many manifestations of the book’s committed racism. This past winter, though, my reading pattern broke down in a way that could only be fixed by a big dose of pulp and sweep. I needed politics, history, romance, violence: bloody mud on the battlefield, babies and lace and ribbons at home. The war novel with a domestic lens is one of my favorite literary subtypes, but none break through a cognitive rut quite as bluntly as “Gone with the Wind.” And so, I recruited a friend and reopened my copy. “Scarlett O’Hara was not beautiful, but men seldom realized it,” the book begins, and I was instantly all the way in.
What ensued was about a thousand text messages back and forth as my friend and I sped through the book, and a slow contagion in which more of our friends have been convinced to pick it up. “Gone with the Wind” is evil, and far more interesting for being evil. (Scarlett, one of the finest comic characters ever written in literature, is, terrifyingly and amazingly, a lot like Donald Trump.) The novel registered to me as a paragon depiction of American political consciousness, or lack thereof. Scarlett’s world is constructed through immeasurable exploitation; it implodes in war and reconstitutes itself in hideous struggle. It all happens about a half-inch away from her face, and, yet, all she really thinks about is her wardrobe, her dinner options, her love life, her bank account. Plenty among us, as our country commits atrocities across the globe, might relate.
For more: read Tolentino on the time McMurtry had her “spellbound.”
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On Our Radar
Coming soon:
In Liane Moriarty’s “Big Little Truths,” ten years have passed since “Big Little Lies,” and the women might finally be facing some consequences. It’s out on August 25th.
Also out on the 25th is Jill Lepore’s “The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State,” about how our dependence on technology has created the conditions for a totally devastated democracy. The book grew from a piece published in The New Yorker, in 2024.
P.S. We reviewed “Lonesome Dove” in 1985. “The novel,” our critic wrote, “resembles a sponge: add the fluid of reading, and it slowly swells until it covers all its vast and wild setting. Very slowly swells.” 🧽