Search results for ""Jessie van Eerden" "Call It Horses""

Book SynopsisWinner of the 2019 Dzanc Prize for Fiction Set in small-town West Virginia in the twilight of the eighties, Call It Horses tells the story of three women—niece, aunt, and stowaway—and an improbable road trip. Frankie is an orphan (or a reluctant wife). Mave is an autodidact (or the town pariah). Nan is an artist (or the town whore). Each separately haunted, Frankie, Mave, and Nan—with a hound in tow—set out in an Oldsmobile Royale for Abiquiú and the desert of Georgia O’Keeffe, seeking an escape from everything they’ve known. Frankie records the journey in letters to her aunt Mave’s dead lover, a linguist named Ruth, sketching out her troubled life and her complicated relationship with Mave, who became her guardian when Frankie was orphaned at sixteen. Slowly, one letter at a time, Frankie exposes the ruins of herself and her fellow passengers: things that chase them, that died too soon, that never lived. With lush prose and brutal empathy, Frankie tells Ruth—and herself—the story of liminality experienced by a woman standing just outside of motherhood, fulfillment, and love.Trade Review"Call It Horses is a spectacular novel. With the gorgeous language of Jayne Anne Phillips and the compassion of Carson McCullers, Jessie van Eerden follows an unforgettable cast of women through their lives and longing in West Virginia with precision and insight. An original, beautifully structured, and deeply moving book." --Karen E. Bender, author of The New Order and Refund, finalist for the National Book Award "Forget ‘Go West, young man.’ Forget cowboys and conquest. Here, it's a blue Oldsmobile Royale that takes three lost women out from the wiles of West Virginia, out from the working poor and humidity and domestic abuse and grief, away from every lost love and hard love they've ever known, as they drive toward the desert ghost of Georgia O'Keeffe, the one woman they think might have had it all figured out. With Call It Horses, Jessie van Eerden has reinvented the classic American road trip into an unforgettable, cinematic shero's journey that will have the reader laughing, crying, and calling up that old best girlfriend, the one you haven't talked to in so long, saying, ‘Life is too damned short. Let's go for a ride.’" --Rebecca Gayle Howell, author of American Purgatory and Render / An Apocalypse “Jessie van Eerden manages, in prose so luminous it feels backlit by the golden hour, to give familiar topics—family, history, grief—their monumental due. But as exact are its descriptions of Appalachian bog and the dusty canyons of West Texas, Call It Horses locates its mystery in the liminal. The westward journey these three women take is filled with take-out meals and cheap hotel rooms, but the novel’s most illuminating route is an unsettling and compassionate search for solace.” —Michael Parker, author of Prairie Fever and All I Have in This World “Call It Horses is so many wonderful things at once: a road novel—three women trying to outrun grief, from the limestone caves of Caudell, West Virginia to the canyons of Palo Duro, Texas; a portrait of the artist as restless skeptic; a meditation on language itself. I know of few writers who write as well as Jessie van Eerden about the sacredness of language, the way it calls forth the world by naming it. Van Eerden doesn’t just write about it; she enacts it formally—the shapeshifting magic of words, the acrobatic possibilities of sentences, the beautiful, yearning, fail and fail better lengths to which we all go to make our minds heard.” —Maud Casey, author of The Man Who Walked Away and The Art of Mystery "A novel of grit and grace. Jessie van Eerden, in language both lean and lush, tells this story of women on the run—women who discover that in leaving they find exactly where they’re meant to be. The final scene is one I’ll remember always.” —Lee Martin, Pulitzer Prize finalist and author of Yours, Jean "I was so moved by this one, I sobbed at the end. And the language! What a gifted author." —Peg Alford Pursell, author of A Girl Goes into the Forest "A rich and lyric meditation on love and individuality, Call It Horses depicts three women fleeing—literally, in a stolen, rusty Oldsmobile—the fixed narratives of gender, family, home, and death they’d been coaxed into. Filled with poetry, working class grit, and undogmatic spirituality, this novel shows us what we gain when we become outlaws in our own lives." —John Englehardt, author of Bloomland

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Book SynopsisWinner of the 2019 Dzanc Prize for FictionSet in small-town West Virginia in the twilight of the eighties, Call It Horses tells the story of three womenniece, aunt, and stowawayand an improbable road trip.Frankie is an orphan (or a reluctant wife). Mave is an autodidact (or the town pariah). Nan is an artist (or the town whore). Each separately haunted, Frankie, Mave, and Nanwith a hound in towset out in an Oldsmobile Royale for Abiquiú and the desert of Georgia O'Keeffe, seeking an escape from everything they've known.Frankie records the journey in letters to her aunt Mave's dead lover, a linguist named Ruth, sketching out her troubled life and her complicated relationship with Mave, who became her guardian when Frankie was orphaned at sixteen. Slowly, one letter at a time, Frankie exposes the ruins of herself and her fellow passengers: things that chase them, that died too soon, that never lived.With lush prose and brutal empathy, Frankie tells Ruthand herselfthe story of liminality experienced by a woman standing just outside of motherhood, fulfillment, and love.

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Book SynopsisWinner of the Dzanc Prize for Fiction A work of brilliant and innovative historical fiction, Asylum delves into the disturbing and seductive relationship between a young hysteric named Augustine and renowned nineteenth-century French neurologist J.M. Charcot. As Charcot risks his career to investigate the controversial disease of hysteria, Augustine struggles to make him acknowledge their interdependence and shared desires—until a new lover, M., drives them all to the brink of fracture. Drawing upon the medical photography, hypnotic states, and “grand demonstrations” that accompanied Charcot’s research, Asylum traces the deterioration of the dynamic between doctor and patient as they transform from mutually entranced creators to jealous and spurned paramours, to fierce rivals, and finally to bitter enemies. Told in lyrical, feverish, and sometimes delirious prose, Nina Shope delivers a captivating narrative at the crossroads of Mary Shelley and Donna Tartt.Trade Review“Nina Shope is such a fierce, precise, and radical writer. The power of her vision and her abundant compassion shine through on every page.” —George Saunders, New York Times bestselling author of Lincoln in the Bardo “With her second book, Nina Shope has outdone herself. Written with tremendous poise and uncommon power, Asylum is a fierce, fascinating, and often truly frightening recreation of the gendered power dynamics at work in the world of 19th century French medicine. Shope’s narrator is a marvel and her portrait of the famous Docteur Charcot, indelible. I’m jealous of those who still have this bracing literary journey ahead of rather than behind them. Read. This. Book!” —Laird Hunt, author of Zorrie “Lush and vertiginous, Shope's Asylum offers a pointed analysis of obsession and power early in the development of psychiatry. A fierce look at how some bodies strive to control other bodies by submitting them to the tyranny of the gaze, of the camera, of touch, always in the name of health. And yet, how easy it is for the tables to be turned, for the observed to imperceptibly slip into the role of observer...” —Brian Evenson, author of The Glassy, Burning Floor of Hell “In Asylum, Nina Shope fulfills the promise of her debut, Hangings, with another work that sears the literary firmament. This is a dangerous text, cutting edge text, as bold as Augustine herself, an indelible journey into the human condition with antagonists caught up in a relentlessly transformative combat of codependency, stripping them of all pretense as they struggle for psychic survival crippled with vulnerabilities both terrible and redemptive. Shope achieves tour de force narrative that at its darkest deepest density still manages to dance across the page, every sentence, every paragraph leaving the reader adrift in wonder world before venturing on to the next note. Asylum solidifies Nina Shope’s place as one of the strongest, strangest, most provocative writers ever been. Asylum got so much heart it’s a wonder the book don’t explode in your hand instead of waiting till it has buried itself soul deep, sanctifying everything it touches with that lingering sense of imaginative wonder that only literature of a certain stature and significance can provide. This work is not an asylum, this work is a sanctuary.” —Arthur Flowers, author of Another Good Loving Blues and The Hoodoo Book of Flowers “Relentlessly researched, Asylum is a burning poem of a novel. Its existence is payback for paternalism and the narcissistic dark side of early Western medicine.” —Stacey Levine, author of The Girl with Brown Fur “ASYLUM is a mesmerizing kaleidoscope of a novel, its narratives of agency, inquiry, and desire shifting brilliantly before our eyes. With each precise and fearless sentence, Nina Shope draws us deeper into the mysteries of her characters’ bodies, hearts, and minds—and what we find there we will not soon forget.” —Sarah Shun-Lien Bynum, author of Likes and Madeleine Is Sleeping“Asylum is historical fiction at its most intimate as we peer deeply into the interior of Augustine, a patient being treated for hysteria by nineteenth-century charismatic neurologist Charcot. The hospital is theatre, and the theatre involves both doctor and patient in a dangerous interplay of seduction and power. We feel the claustrophobia of obsession within each finely wrought sentence, and as we long for Augustine’s escape, we are pressed at each turn to interrogate the very nature of escape and the possibilities of freedom experienced within the self.”--Jessie van Eerden, author of Call It Horses"Bold, dynamic, gorgeously written, Nina Shope’s Asylum is a fascinating exploration of the torqued relationship between the famous nineteenth-century French neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot and his most well-known patient, Louise Augustine Gleizes; a wonderful catawampus-ing of the love story; and a richly researched investigation into power, desire, and narrative possibility."—Lance Olsen, author of Skin Elegies"Asylum is a gorgeously imagined glimpse into the relationship of Charcot to his famous patient, Augustine, via haunting episodes where eroticism collides with scientific inquiry. I was captivated by this lyrical and intelligent examination of the ways we create the body via sculpture, photography, medicine, story, and gesture (both involuntary and rehearsed). A delicious novel that flays its characters to their dark, deeply human hearts."--Tina May Hall, author of The Snow Collectors

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