Jaimy Gordon

In the early 1970s, trainer Tommy Hansel attempts a horse racing scam at a small, backwoods track in West Virginia, but nothing goes according to his plan when the horses refuse to cooperate and nearly everyone at the track seems to know his scheme.

Lord of Misrule

Reallife Stories

The Bend, the Lip, the Kid

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. €¬‚¬€

A Novel

”Romanen er så overbevisende, så eksotisk, så umulig at kategorisere, at den må blive en sikker vinder.” New York Times

A republication of the famed novel by Jaimy Gordon.

Bogeywoman

Reallife Stories: a Poem

A Los Angeles Times Best Book or the Year National Book Award Winner Jaimy Gordon’s bold and daring coming of age novel combines the teenaged angst of Catcher in the Rye with the humor and tragedy of Girl, Interrupted. Ursie Koderer knows herself to be a monster--doomed to be different from other girls--very different. When she’s discovered cutting herself at camp, she goes AWOL, and lands in a Baltimore psychiatric hospital. Ursie, now known as the Bogeywoman, joins up with the other misfits on the adolescent ward. They start a bughouse rock group, steal a nitrous oxide machine. As a mental patient Ursie is a success. But then she’s implicated in the accidental burning of a friend. Locked away, the Bogeywoman meets the beautiful, mysterious Doctor Zuk, a woman psychiatrist from somewhere east of the Urals. Their affair is the main event in this gorgeous novel of love, crime, liberation, and flight to something like a new world.

on L’ultimo giorno di gloria Jaimy Gordon, pubblicata da una piccola casa editrice indipendente americana, ha vinto il NATIONAL BOOK AWARD 2010 ed è stata finalista al Pen / Faulkner Award 2011. La scrittrice, che aveva già pubblicato tre romanzi, il primo nel 1974, ha visto finalmente riconosciuto e acclamato il suo lavoro dai critici e dal grande pubblico: L’ultimo giorno di gloria ha venduto 100.000 copie e il Time l’ha segnalato come uno dei migliori dieci libri dell’anno.

L'ultimo giorno di gloria

Circumspections from an Equestrian Statue

Perhaps the ultimate woman's road novel, She Drove Without Stopping presents young Jane Turner's cross-country journey toward self-possession. As she refuses to turn back from a terrain we all know is dangerous to women, her wit wrestles with the violence she encounters on a risky odyssey. She Drove Without Stopping is a lusty and forthright novel. Jaimy Gordon, whose earlier books have earned her reputation as a brilliant stylist, here tells the story of a very young, very bold American woman deciding what she wants. In Jane Turner she has created a character so fresh, so self-consumed and self-righteous, that she reveals secrets of a special and particularly American type of woman.

She Drove Without Stopping

Keith Waldrop

Narrates the author's family history, recalling a time when his mother led her sons across the Midwest in search of a religious sect that she could join, a journey which ends in her total isolation.

Jaimy Gordon

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