I’ve never read anything quite like Kathryn Scanlan’s Kick the Latch. Crafted from interviews conducted with a woman named Sonia who’s worked in America’s itinerant and hardscrabble horse racing industry all her life, it’s not quite a memoir, but it reads like one.
I love how Scanlan doesn’t waste time explaining jargon or inserting herself as an interlocutor—reading this book feels like meeting Sonia herself without any intermediary or filter. It’s impossible to tell what’s direct from the interview transcripts and what’s Scanlan’s artistic intervention because all of it rings so true.
That’s what makes this book so fascinating to me, along with the unprecedented access Sonia gives us to the “backstage” culture of American racetracks in the late 1970s and early 1980s.
Kathryn Scanlan's Kick the Latch vividly captures the arc of one woman's life at the racetrack-the flat land and ramshackle backstretch; the bad feelings and friction; the winner's circle and the racetrack bar; the fancy suits and fancy boots; and the "particular language" of "grooms, jockeys, trainers, racing secretaries, stewards, pony people, hotwalkers, everybody"-with economy and integrity.
Based on transcribed interviews with Sonia, a horse trainer, the novel investigates form and authenticity in a feat of synthesis reminiscent of Charles Reznikoff's Testimony. As Scanlan puts it, "I wanted to preserve-amplify, exaggerate-Sonia's idiosyncratic speech, her bluntness, her flair as a storyteller.…
Bess Winter’s book is a dazzling debut collection. It is full of exactly the kind of offbeat, formally experimental, historically informed short fiction I love to read, with a wicked sense of humor.
Thomas Edison’s mythical cache of discarded talking dolls provides the basis for exploring Edison’s West Orange female factory workers’ lack of agency. Claire Clairmont (Mary Shelley’s stepsister!) is given a chance to shine as a writer in her own right, redefined by something more lasting than her ill-fated trysts with Lord Byron. Hashish candy causes an uproar outside a small-town pharmacy. A little girl at sleepaway horse camp impulsively shears off a pony’s tail.
Each story Winter tells here is precise, bizarre, and utterly lovely—I can’t wait to read what she writes next.
"Opening these pages is like stepping through a secret doorway to discover a menagerie of wonders, impossibly beautiful. There are sentences here so fine, so perfectly worded, they made me gasp. Unsettling, mysterious, slightly subversive, deeply moving, these stories are small punches to the heart. Though collectively they feel huge, as if Bess Winter drew them from the worlds of a dozen novels, so richly populated are they with ideas, desires, dreams. Machines of Another Era is the startling debut of a thrilling new voice on the literary scene." - Josh Weil, National Book Foundation 5 under 35 honoree and…
I didn’t know much about Agatha Christie before picking this book up, having only read Murder on the Orient Express—but I did know (and love!) historian Lucy Worsley’s detail-oriented, narrative approach to biography thanks to her earlier explorations of Jane Austen and Queen Victoria’s lives.
In Worsley’s hands, this most British of authors emerges as an iconoclastic and, at times, problematic figure, far ahead of her time, with a deeply ambivalent relationship to her fictional detectives’ fame and an unusually independent lifestyle for a woman of her era.
Worsley is a master at presenting historical figures’ lives with complexity, empathy, and just enough irreverence to help us see them as human. I’ll read anything she writes.
A new, fascinating account of the life of Agatha Christie from celebrated literary and cultural historian Lucy Worsley.
"Nobody in the world was more inadequate to act the heroine than I was."
Why did Agatha Christie spend her career pretending that she was “just” an ordinary housewife, when clearly she wasn’t? Her life is fascinating for its mysteries and its passions and, as Lucy Worsley says, "She was thrillingly, scintillatingly modern." She went surfing in Hawaii, she loved fast cars, and she was intrigued by the new science of psychology, which helped her through devastating mental illness.
I wrote Horse Show with just two rules in mind. Each story should include a horse (or mule or horse-like object), and a show—whether that's a TV series, a movie, a roadside attraction, a stage show, or a photograph.
From the tale of a horse-themed rollercoaster on Coney Island to a feminist retelling of Mr. Ed, the thirteen short stories in Horse Show explore how we humans have used, abused, and admired horses throughout American history.
