Lord of Misrule by Jaimy Gordon
At the rock-bottom end of the sport of kings sits the ruthless and often violent world of cheap horse racing, where trainers and jockeys, grooms and hotwalkers, loan sharks and touts are all struggling to take an edge, or prove their luck, or just survive. Equal parts Nathanael West, Damon Runyon and Eudora Welty, Lord of Misrule follows five characters -- scarred and lonely dreamers in the American grain -- through a year and four races at Indian Mound Downs, downriver from Wheeling, West Virginia.Horseman Tommy Hansel has a scheme to rescue his failing stable: He'll ship four unknown but ready horses to Indian Mound Downs, run them in cheap claiming races at long odds, and then gut out fast before anyone notices. The problem is, at this rundown riverfront half-maile racetrack in the Northern Panhandle, everybody notices -- veteran groom Medicine Ed, Kidstuff the blacksmith, old lady gyp Deucey Gifford, stall superintendent Suitcase Smithers, eventually even the ruled-off racetrack financier Two-Tie and the ominous leading trainer, Joe Dale Bigg. But no one bothers to factor in Tommy Hansel's go-fer girlfriend, Maggie Koderer. Like the beautiful, used-up, tragic horses she comes to love, Maggie has just enough heart to wire everyone's flagging hopes back to the source of all luck. ¬¬
National Book Award Winner
PEN/Faulkner Award Finalist Jaimy Gordon's third novel, Bogeywoman was on the Los Angeles Times list of Best Books for 2000. Her second novel, She Drove Without Stopping, brought her an Academy-Institute Award for her fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Gordon's short story, A Night's Work, which shares a number of characters with Lord of Misrule, appeared in Best American Short Stories 1995. She is also the author of a novella, Circumspections from an Equestrian Statue, and the fantasy classic novel Shamp of the City-Solo. Gordon teaches at Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo and in the Prague Summer Program for Writers.
| SKU | Unavailable |
| ISBN 13 | 9780307946737 |
| ISBN 10 | 0307946738 |
| Title | Lord of Misrule |
| Author | Jaimy Gordon |
| Series | Vintage Contemporaries |
| Condition | Unavailable |
| Binding Type | Paperback |
| Publisher | Random House USA Inc |
| Year published | 2011-03-08 |
| Number of pages | 304 |
| Cover note | Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary. |
| Note | Unavailable |