Keeneland - by Alyson Hagy (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

From award-winning writer Alyson Hagy comes a novel set at Kentucky's Keeneland racetrack, where the horses run for glory and people stake love and money -- all to win at the sport of kings.

Hagy, a compelling storyteller who has the "same way with language as her characters have with animals" "(San Jose Mercury News), " introduces Kerry Connelly, a skilled exercise rider who hasn't yet learned that liking a horse doesn't make it faster but loving one means genuine risk.

Review Quotes

Annie Proulx Hagy's character Kerry is one of the most psychologically complex and realistic women in recent American literature. Increasingly hardened by experience, locked into a destructive pattern of wrong choices, and ex-pecting little from others or herself, she gets out of the tough corners with an obdurate persistence that translates as survival, not only in the rough racetrack milieu but in contemporary American life and mores. Hagy is a writer on her way.

Bob Shacochis Alyson Hagy's voice is solid hickory, and Keeneland is a world weaned on cards and Thoroughbreds, the rhumba of power and money, the bourbon-soaked lullaby of truths. An honest writer has given us an honest book that gallops headlong toward the shadowy horizon. Praise be.

Madison Smartt Bell Alyson Hagy captures the speed, fervor, and desperate urgency of the racehorse world as very few writers have done before. Keeneland is a novel with a large, powerful, passionate heart.

Nicholas Delbanco A book that fairly races from starter's gate to finish line, composed with edgy knowingness and an unblinking eye. Bet on Alyson Hagy to show, place, and win.

About the Author

Alyson Hagy grew up on a farm in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia. She graduated from Williams College, where she twice won the Benjamin Wainwright Prize for her fiction. She went on to earn an MFA in Creative Writing at the University of Michigan. While at Michigan, she was awarded a Hopwood Prize in Short Fiction and a Roy Cowden Fellowship. Hagy's first collection of fiction, Madonna on her Back, was published by Stuart Wright in 1986.