Horse Show - Jess Bowers
Product Details:
Paperback : 156 Pages
ISBN : 9781951631314
Cover design: Gwen Grafft
About the Book:
From the tale of Lady, the mare who read a Duke University psychologist’ s mind, to television palomino Mr. Ed’ s hypnotic hold over Wilbur Post, the thirteen tales in Horse Show explore how humans have used, abused, and spectacularized their equine companions throughout American history. Wrestling with themes of obsolescence, grief, and nostalgia, Bowers guides us through her museum of equine esoterica with arresting imagery, unflinching intensity, and dark humor.
About the Author:
Jess Bowers lives in St. Louis, Missouri, where she works as an Associate Professor of English and Humanities at Maryville University. Her short stories have won the Winter Anthology Prize and Laurel Review’s Midwest Short Fiction Contest. When not writing or reading near cats and aquariums, she can be found riding horses, exploring museums, and watching too much television. Find her on on Twitter @prettyminotaur and on Instagram @bowersjess
“If Steven Millhauser wrote a book about horses, he might have written something a little bit like Jess Bowers’ fascinating short story collection Horse Show. It’s meticulous, lovely, strange, and both utterly engrossing and also completely not what I’d expected when I opened up a book of horse stories.”
“Bowers’ writing is ridiculously smart and meticulous, but also lyrical and driven by the story itself. Horse Show forces a reader to examine the history of abuse and spectacle of horses, but it also shows how horses have come to be companions. Bowers shows us the best and the worst of the historical relationship between man and equine, and you don’t need to be a horse lover to thoroughly enjoy and become engrossed in this short collection.”
“With the precise detail of a historian and the lyricism of a poet, Bowers drops a lariat around these moments in time. The stories she offers are horse stories, but, in the end, they are the stories of us.”
“Bowers dramatizes the equine esoterica she has unearthed with the most consummate skill. Highly original…quirky, fascinating, easy to read and hard to forget.”
“These stories bristle with fascinating detail and dazzle with plot turns. Bowers’s compassionate and precise eye brings horses of historical record to life, animating human cruelties and unexpected tendernesses.”
“Bowers’s stunning, debut collection examines mankind’s forgotten relationship with our other best friend, the horse. Witty, lyrical, and heartbreaking, these stories give us insight into how the history of America has been written on the body of the equine— beloved and battered.”
“Like Muybridge’s famous motion studies (studied here in one of these stunning flickering fictions), Bowers captures the kinetic, erases space, and freezes the blur. Bowers invents a dozen new genres of prose to elegantly capture each one of these irresistible metamorphic locomotive lyrics.”
“Merging wit, empathy, and vibrant language, Bowers brings her equine and human characters to life, all the while exploring the historical intersections of show business, film and photography, modernization, and the myths of the American West. These stories are precise and surprising, carrying the power of both tragedy and wonder.”
“Bowers’s Horse Show is a feat. In a slim but wholly dynamic collection, Bowers skillfully weaves stories from fact and her imagination to bring these incredible animals and compelling characters to explore the exploitation of horses in human industry. In riveting, intelligent, and heartbreaking scenes, Horse Show is like no other book I’ve read.””