Keeneland HB - Hardcover

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.

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.

Alyson Hagy was raised on a farm in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia. She is the author of three collections of short fiction -- Madonna on Her Back, Hardware River, and Graveyard of the Atlantic. Her work was also included in Best American Short Stories 1997. She lives and teaches in Laramie, Wyoming.