A brilliant novel that captures the dusty, dark, and beautiful world of small-time horse racing, where trainers, jockeys, grooms and grifters vie for what little luck is offered at a run-down West Virginia track. Tommy Hansel has a plan: run four horses, all better than they look on paper, at long odds at Indian Mound Downs, then grab the purse -- or cash a bet -- and run before anyone’s the wiser. At his side is Maggie Koderer, who finds herself powerfully drawn to the gorgeous, used up animals of the cheap track. She also lands in the cross-hairs of leading trainer Joe Dale Bigg. But as news of Tommy’s plan spreads, from veteran groom Medicine Ed, to loan shark Two-Tie, to Kidstuff the blacksmith, it’s Maggie, not Tommy or the handlers of legendary stakes horse Lord of Misrule, who will find what's valuable in a world where everything has a price.

Lord of Misrule (Vintage Contemporaries)

Humor & Entertainment

Gordon, Jaimy

Humor

Vintage

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.

Bogeywoman (Vintage Contemporaries)

Literature & Fiction

United States

"Lord of Misrule" is a darkly realistic novel about a young woman living through a year of horse racing at a half-mile track in West Virginia, while everyone's best laid schemes keep going brutally wrong. With her first novel since her acclaimed "Bogeywoman" (1999), Jaimy Gordon bears comparison to other great writers of the American demimonde, such as Nathanael West, Damon Runyon, and Eudora Welty.

Lord of Misrule

Quercus Publishing Plc

This is the third edition of one of the finest comic novels to appear in the last half century, a book that has been compared with the very best of Flann OBrien, Angela Carter, and Witold Gombrowicz. Appearing first in 1974, Shamp of the City-Solo quickly became an underground sensation. This “fantasy” novel takes place in a dystopian parallel universe, a world set at an odd remove where the heros hunger for fame displays its mythic origin. Hughbury Shamp is the reluctant teenager who becomes apprenticed to three “masters” at the West Poolesville Depot on the Sumpsky Prospect, across the River Sump from Big Yolk, the city-solo. His education proceeds through various misadventures with the likes of impresario Sergei Shipoff, Dr. Harry Analarge, and the World-Friar Tapsvine, all the while he is being propelled toward stardom as the breakfast speaker at the murderously competitive Arslevering Ox Roast. The writing is simply extraordinarya style that seems born of Lawrence Sterne and Djuna Barnes, with sidelong glances at Samuel Becketts Watt, Marcus Aurelius, and the works of Sir Thomas Browne. With her very first novel, Jaimy Gordon managed that almost impossible feat: a novel of lasting consequence.

Shamp of the City-Solo: A Novel

Treacle Press

Shamp of the City Solo

Treacle Pr

Shamp of the City-Solo

The Bend, the Lip, the Kid: Real Life Stories

Poetry

Bookslinger

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: A Novel

Contemporary

McPherson

Circumspections from an Equestrian Statue

Burning Deck

In the era of the sexual revolution, Jane Turner rebels against her conservative parents by driving across the country, spending a year in search of freedom and her own independence

She Drove Without Stopping

Algonquin Books

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Books by Gordon, Jaimy